Mediaboss Marketing

The double standards have become mind-boggling.

It wasn't all that long ago that we were treated to "exposs," mainly in the right-wing media, of the reckless spending by the Obama family for vacations and golfing trips.

Especially outrageous, we were constantly reminded, was the president's insistence on taking his entire family to Hawaii, his home state, for Christmas each of his eight years in office.

"It requires dozens of Secret Service agents, military personnel and other government employees to guarantee (the Obamas') safety and ease of travel around Oahu," complained the "Moonie" paper the Washington Times.

Thank goodness, the paper reported during the 2016 holidays, this is the last time.

"The Obamas are once again renting a multimillion-dollar oceanfront home in Kailua, a town on the northeast side of the island where houses in the neighborhood fetch around $10 million," it added. "It's near golf courses and a Marine Corps base where the president goes for morning workouts at the gym."

The paper wasn't alone. Most media outlets reported that the holiday trips to Hawaii cost more than $4.8 million and that, times eight, they pointed out, meant taxpayers paid in the range of $35 million to $40 million for the Hawaii getaways.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump himself blistered Obama's "free spending," especially for golfing excursions. Rest assured, Americans were promised, a President Trump would spend most of his time right where he should in the White House taking care of business "because there's so much work to be done."

According to estimates from the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan agency that keeps track of federal spending, Obama ran up travel expenses of about $97 million during his eight years in office. Trump has blown right past that number in less than three years, mostly on golf trips and vacation time at his own resorts.

In a one-month period in 2017, the GAO found, Trump spent $13.6 million on just four trips to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. That's $3.4 million per trip. To Florida for a few days. Not to Hawaii for three weeks.

The New York Times editorialized earlier this month that what's more egregious is the administration's attempts to keep the spending secret at least until after the 2020 election.

Democrats, of course, want a complete accounting of not just how much Trump is spending on travel, but how much taxpayers are shelling out for his family as well. And what they'd really like to know is how much of all that spending is winding up as profit for the family itself.

The issue came to a head in recent weeks when Trump's Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, informed Congress he wants to return the Secret Service to his department where it once was until the formation of the Department of Homeland Security several years ago.

Congressional Democrats informed Mnuchin that as part of the deal, they needed to know how much the Secret Service was spending to protect Trump and his family on their travels. Mnuchin said he wouldn't disclose that until after the 2020 election, apparently to prevent the size of the spending from becoming an issue in the campaign.

The same Republicans, though, who were quick to blister Obama for spending too much on travel, don't blink an eye when it comes to Trump.

Just like the size of the national debt a scandal when Obama was in office is no longer an issue even though we're adding a trillion dollars to it each year.

Oh, yes. The double standards are alive and well.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times.dzweifel@madison.com,608-252-6410and on Twitter @DaveZweifel.

Share your opinion on this topic by sending a letter to the editor to tctvoice@madison.com. Include your full name, hometown and phone number. Your name and town will be published. The phone number is for verification purposes only. Please keep your letter to 250 words or less.

See the rest here:
Plain Talk: Double standards from Obama to Trump are mind-boggling - Madison.com