In the year since former Donald Trump has been out of office, the former president has cost the U.S. Secret Service more than $1.3 million on hotel and transportation bills, according to documents obtained by The Daily Beast.
Traveling between South Florida and New Jersey, federal agents spent $788,286 on hotel rooms, another $286,802 on rental cars, and $262,091 on air and rail travel.
The Daily Beast recently received the documents after filing a public records request with the federal law enforcement agency, which protects current and former U.S. presidents.
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While that $1.3 million is only a fraction of the overall cost of protection, there is some welcome news for taxpayers: It appears some federal agents are no longer paying for overly expensive bedrooms at Trump properties, opting instead for rooms at a nearby Hilton, Marriott, and Homewood Suites instead.
Still, there are plenty of other costs not included in response to The Daily Beast records request—the records don’t show how many agents were assigned to Trump’s security detail or whether they accrued other costs during their assignment—but we know many of these extra costs exist.
For example, the records we obtained don’t include any spending at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, where Trump continued his unscrupulous practice of charging high rates for rented rooms on his own properties.
As The Washington Post revealed last year, the real estate billionaire charged the government $396 for each day agents rented rooms at his Mar-a-Lago Club. Those charges alone amounted to $40,011 in just the first three months after he left office.
Then there was his decision, while still in office, to give his rich adult children and former officials an extra six months of Secret Service protection. The Washington Post reported that it cost American taxpayers $1.7 million to have federal agents follow them around as they enjoyed ski vacations and weekend getaways, like former Treasury Secretary and investment banker Steven Mnuchin’s personal business trip to Israel and Qatar five months after he left office.
All former presidents get Secret Service protection for life, and that means Trump is followed by armed federal agents while he stays and travels between his oceanside estate in Florida and his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. According to former agency personnel, ex-presidents normally have two teams guarding them at all times, in alternating shifts.
In the time since leaving office, Trump has continued to exhibit the same pride in his Secret Service protective detail that he did when he occupied the White House, often showing them off to guests and the MAGA glitterati who routinely visit and roam the halls of Mar-a-Lago and his other private clubs.
Over the past year, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, the twice-impeached former president has repeatedly claimed to his visitors that he has the toughest and best Secret Service detail of any current or former living U.S. president. Trump, according to one of the sources, also has a habit of boasting to guests about how the agents who are still assigned to him are so “handsome”—an ever-recurring Trump compliment.
Furthermore, as sources described, Trump has kept up with another recurring tic that existed during his stint in the Oval Office. In his post-presidency, Trump has been known to strike up brief conversations with agents, and then smile and ask, “So you voted for me, right?”—just before making the agent listen to his standard operating grievance about how the 2020 presidential election was somehow “rigged” against him. (It was not.)
A former senior Trump administration official added that the then-president “liked the [agents] that looked physically fit [and] nice-looking,” but “asked for overweight [and overweight-looking] ones to be removed” from his detail.
The Secret Service declined to say how the $1.3 million travel and hotel tab for guarding Trump during the past year compares to similar costs for protecting the four other living former presidents: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The agency also would not elaborate on the additional costs of renting workspace at Mar-a-Lago.
“Due to the need to maintain operational security, the U.S. Secret Service does not comment on the means, methods, or resources used to conduct our protective operations,” said agency spokesman Kang Lee.
Those extra rooms at Mar-a-Lago would be important, as they’d serve as a command post where agents can coordinate his protection and a down room for agents to remain on standby.
The documents obtained by The Daily Beast don’t even hint at overspending by the agents themselves. For example, agents rented two “intermediate” cars from a Budget at Palm Beach International Airport for only $36 a day during a few weeks last month.
But it’s impossible to tell if the former president’s criminally indicted company, The Trump Organization, is charging elevated rates for taking up seats on his personal jet, because the agency completely redacted all flight expenses. The agency claimed that information would violate personal privacy and disclose law enforcement techniques and procedures.
In fact, the $1.3 million spent on hotels and travel seems a tad bit lower than expected, according to retired Secret Service deputy assistant director James Helminski.
“That tells me most of his travel is domestic. It actually sounds low. I don’t think you have the full story,” he said.
