WASHINGTON – In recent months, President Donald Trump has invited supporters who have “Make America Great Again” campaign with him on stage during official presidential speeches. He has criticized Democratic rival Joe Biden in Rose Garden addresses. He has been playing campaign-style video games in the White House letter room, and has used his campaign playlist, typically reserved for rallies, at official presidential events.
Presidents running for re-election have traditionally worked to balance official government companies with campaign activity. But government doggies and officials from previous administrations warn that Trump has violated that norm, showing an unusual willingness to use his presidency platform for political purposes.
Trump’s drive to erase the lines between his campaign and his official duties came to a head last week when he confirmed that he was considering accepting his nomination for the Republican presidential nomination – one of the most anticipated moments of the election season – from the White House South Lawn.
“I’ll probably do my live from the White House,” Trump told Fox News. “The easiest, least expensive and, I think, very nice [location] would be live from the White House. “
Presidential ethics veterans said the savings did not have to take him away. “What Trump is doing is a form of steel,” said Norm Eisen, who was President Barack Obama’s special adviser and special assistant to ethics and reform.
“The taxpayer earns funds from the government to do the official business of the government. If they want to support a political candidate, they are making a political contribution,” he said. “For Trump to reach out effectively in all our pockets to subsidize his planned activity on the South Wall … no, the taxpayer does not have to pay for it.”
Trump’s boundary extension is about the location of his acceptance speech, Eisen and others said.
The president has increasingly transformed the official events of the White House, both in Washington and on the road, into political events, as the coronavirus pandemic has kept him from the usual campaign trail and unable to hold personal meetings.
Since March, Trump has taken official presidential trips to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio. He has also made multiple visits to Arizona, Texas and Florida. All of those states are critical of Trump’s re-election.
“It has always been a fine line that presidents ride to ensure that official activity in an election year does not go too far in campaign activity,” said Kedric Payne, general counsel and senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit advocacy group. . Trump, Payne said, is “barely disguised as official activity.”
On an official government trip to Texas in July, for example, a senior administration official told NBC News that the attempt was intended to highlight Trump’s energy policy and contrast it with that of Biden’s. On another official White House trip to Arizona in June, the president heads to an event that was studied by Students for Trump at a church in Phoenix.
On his most recent presidential trip last week, to Ohio, the White House said Trump was met on Air Force One by a senior campaign adviser in the state, Bob Paduchik. The president held a small campaign-style rally on the gut plane and then visited a Whirlpool factory, where he made fun of Biden (“Have you ever seen Biden, where he always says the wrong state?”). He ended the tour with a round table for fans and a cashier for a campaign.
The tours can be expensive if the air traffic and the cost of federal mandated secret service protection are considered.
When a presidency addresses both official and political events, the White House intends to use a formula to determine the amount of money that the campaign as a party should be reimbursed to the Treasury Department to protect taxpayers from paying for political activities. The formula is generally not made public.
A spokesman for the Federal Election Commission said that in order to distinguish political travel from official travel, the White House would have to consider the purposes and nature of the events at each stop.
According to FEC data, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have reimbursed more than $ 600,000 to the Treasury for aviation since May. Neither the Trump campaign nor the RNC provided NBC News with a breakdown of which taxpayer trips were reimbursed.
Trump has also officially held a number of constituent events at the White House since the pandemic hit, which involved truck drivers, farmers, veterans and seniors – a major voting bloc whose support for the president has slipped amid the pandemic. Five of the nearly two dozen events have been with faith leaders, a demographic that Trump pushed to victory in 2016, but whose support this time has softened.
The campaign has pushed back criticism that the president is abusing events in the White House.
“Democrats and the media are desperate to mouse President Trump. They do not want him to tweet, they do not want him to hold rallies, they do not want him to speak on Mount Rushmore, and now they do not want him to hold press conferences,” said Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director. “Every week, Joe Biden reads speeches from the teleprompter who attacks the president and the media happily reports every word, and President Trump is right to fight back.”
While there are some clear rules governing what kind of political activity the president can engage in on official trips and on the grounds of the White House (for example, he cannot make fundraising calls from the Oval Office), many of the political actions of the president led by tradition and norms.
The Hatch Act, a law that restricts the political activities that federal employees can participate in to ensure that federal policies are implemented in a non-partisan manner and to protect federal workers from political coercion, does not apply to the president.
Officials from former administrations say disconnecting politics from policy can be difficult, and many rely on White House lawyers, advisers and watchdogs to prevent Hatch Act and ethics violations.
“They were afraid of losing Congress, so they pushed the envelope on a lot of things,” said Richard Painter, a Trump critic who was the White House chief advocate for President George W. Bush, recalling the midterm elections of 2006, when he often had to back down on some actions of administration officials.
Still, said Greg Jenkins, who was Bush’s deputy assistant and director of the White House front, “we had a policy that drew a bright line between official and political events.”
“All White Houses do events at the White House that advocate or oppose certain policies or proposals. While this is done for political purposes – to convince people on your side – they were not elective,” Jenkins said.
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Johanna Maska, director of the Obama White House from 2009 to 2015, said she and other officials will receive regular Hatch Act and ethical training from the White House attorney.
Maska said she recalled discussions during the 2012 campaign about using Obama’s official armored stage with the presidency at political events were an example of disproportionate influence and a burden on taxpayers. Eventually, the campaign decided to buy its own armored podium for Obama to use at events that, Maska recalls, were expensive.
“Our typical standard was that we wanted to pay for everything to make sure we followed the law and did not make intimate types of contributions,” Maska said.
Eisen, the special adviser to Obama, said imposing a strict set of rules on the use of Air Force One and compensation, including ethical issues, was an “enormous priority” for the administration. “I personally trained everyone in the White House on these rules so they would not break them,” he said.
Eisen recalls that Pete Rouse, a senior Obama adviser who is an avid Grateful Dead fan, said he needed to hang an Obama poster signed in his office by the band, because “d there can be no taste of politics in this workplace, which is for policy. “
Government watchdogs say Trump has strayed far from the ethical norms of previous administrations. They say he poses a dangerous president who could erode public confidence.
“There are all kinds of debates, and the thing I was proud of was that our lawyer would challenge us to make sure we make the best decision for the taxpayers,” Maska said. “My question is: what does this council do?”
