President Trump’s prized south Florida hotel nearly doubled its room rate ahead of Trump’s visit on Thursday, driving costs up at a time when advance staff from the White House and Secret Service will be staying there with taxpayers footing the bill.
The Republican National Committee announced its decision to hold its winter meeting at the Trump National Doral Miami resort in November last year — a highly lucrative opportunity for the president’s hotel, which has otherwise seen plummeting rates. Once a cash cow, the 643-room resort’s net operating income was reported in 2017 to have fallen by 69% over two years.
The rate spike began in mid-January, soon after the president’s attendance at the 2020 RNC winter meeting was announced. The property’s least expensive rooms jumped from $254 to $539, a new report by the Huffington Post said, a figure that lies just below the maximum per-night rate that U.S. government rules allow for a hotel in the area. The cost is three times the usual per diem rate.
An incident report filed in May last year details Rudy Giuliani associate and GOP congressional candidate Robert Hyde’s arrest at the hotel, an episode described by the police as a “male in distress.” Hyde, who said he feared for his life, believed a hit man was out to get him. Hyde was said to have been stalking former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, but he and others have since cast doubt on whether that was true.
The White House pulled back on hosting the 2020 Group of Seven summit at Trump’s Doral property but not before the president attacked the Constitution’s “phony emoluments clause.”
Trump critics have charged that his hotel properties have put him in violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which says that federal officeholders cannot receive anything of benefit from foreign state officials.
