President Trump doesn’t deserve praise for donating his first quarter salary to the National Park Service.
The donation marks the continuation of a broken campaign promise, and it’s being done at your expense.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer announced Monday that Trump would donate the first three months of his presidential salary to the agency headed by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.
“The president is personally proud to contribute the first quarter of his salary to the important mission of the Park Service,” Spicer said at a White House press briefing. “It is every penny the president received … from Jan. 20 noon forward.”
Zinke, who was presented at the briefing for a check in the amount of $78,333.32, was pleased as punch.
“We are going to dedicate and put it against the infrastructure on our nation’s battlefields,” he told reporters. “We are about $229 million behind in deferred maintenance on our battlefields alone.”
It’s nice that additional taxpayer dollars are going toward the preservation of the nation’s parks and monuments, but Trump did say repeatedly in 2015 and 2016 that he would reject the $400,000 presidential salary.
“As far as salary is concerned, I won’t take even one dollar,” he said September 2015. “I am totally giving up my salary if I become president.”
Later, on Nov. 13, Trump repeated in an interview on 60 Minutes that he would take no salary as commander in chief.
“I think I have to by law take $1, so I’ll take $1 a year,” he said. “No, I’m not going to take the salary. I’m not taking it.”
Trump’s team was informed eventually that the president is required under Article II of U.S. Constitution to accept a salary. The reason for this is that the framers wanted to avoid a situation where want of money could open the commander in chief to bribery.
Trump and his team then tweaked his election year promise.
“He is required to get a paycheck but will be giving it back to (the) treasury or donating,” spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in an email to PolitiFact.
Huckabee added at the time that they were reviewing the legality of returning or donating the salary.
Spicer announced at a press conference in March that the president would donate his salary to charity. The White House spokesman asked reporters at the time to suggest where the money should go.
On Monday, the White House announced that a federal agency — not a privately held charity — would be the recipient of the president’s supposed generosity.
To recap: Trump pledged to take no White House salary. He then revised that promise and vowed to donate the money to charity. Spicer then announced this week that the president’s first taxpayer-funded paycheck would go to a taxpayer-funded agency.
If Trump is going to renege on a promise to forgo a salary because he learned only recently that the job to which he applied bars him from refusing a paycheck, he could at least give the money directly back to the taxpayers. He could assist, say, one of the privately held veterans groups he talked about during the election.
Funneling additional tax dollars into a federal agency is about as far off as possible from the spirit of pledging to take no White House salary at all, and it is amazing to see certain members of Trump’s base cheer it.
