Side Note

Wait, it only costs $195 a night to stay at Mar-A-Lago?

Does Mar-A-Lago actually suck? (Probably.)

On August 7, ProPublica dropped a bombshell investigative report detailing how control of the United States’ Department of Veterans Affairs has been, during the Trump Administration, effectively ceded to a trio of Donald Trump’s rich friends who hang out with him at his Mar-A-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. As you can imagine, this arrangement yielded a metric ton of self-dealing and outright graft, and a few days after ProPublica ran its initial piece, the organization uploaded the underlying documents that they uncovered so that everyone could look through them. Well, I looked through them, and the strangest thing I found was that a room at Mar-A-Lago only costs $195 per night.

Now, $195 a night is still plenty expensive, but the above receipt from the hotel was furnished in an email chain in which a group of bureaucrats were arguing whether or not a member of the Trump administration had the right to a refund for a Holiday Inn cancellation fee for a room that cost $179 a night? Either that’s a really nice Holiday Inn, or Mar-A-Lago isn’t as sick as Donald Trump would like us to think it is.

Then again, everything that Donald Trump owns looks really glitzy but actually sucks, so this shouldn’t really come as a surprise.