In a lot of ways, becoming president of the United States hasn’t been great for Donald Trump’s bottom line, thanks to his name and brand being synonymous with racism, kidnapping, corruption, sexual harassment, white supremacy, the death of facts, mass murder, and a crazy man who goes on TV and claims his enemies are probably running a satanic, sex-trafficking cult. Those little things have led to tenants in Trump Tower reportedly dumping their condos at a loss just to escape the stench by association, canceled hotel deals, and “sharp decline[s]” at his flagship resorts.

Still, in other ways, being the most powerful person in America has been absolutely tremendous for Trump’s family business, which he refused to divest from after being inaugurated and still profits from to this day. For one, Republican politicians, foreign officials, corporate executives, and anyone looking to grease the wheels of the federal government know their money will go far at the Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C. “Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’ Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’” a diplomat told the Washington Post in 2016. For another, he’s able to use trips abroad to peddle his money-losing golf clubs, where he can also “suggest” the vice president spend the night despite non-Trump properties making more sense. And then, of course, there are the trips to Mar-a-Lago and his club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

We’ve known for some time that these frequent jaunts to his own properties—280 of them to date—either to meet with heads of state or to simply get away for the weekend, cost taxpayers millions of dollars. But in a new report out today, the Washington Post puts an actual price tag on the amount of money Trump has funneled from the U.S. Treasury, as well as his campaign, directly into his own pocket: at least $8.1 million, which is reportedly more than his hotels in Hawaii and Vancouver have taken in since 2017. It also reveals what an out and out con the president is, bilking taxpayers for not just large items like hotel rooms— which, of course, they wouldn’t have to pay for if he was at the White House or a private residence—but the kind that flows out of a tap:

In the case of the government, Trump’s visits turned it into a captive customer, newly revealed documents show. What the government needed from Trump’s properties, it had to buy from Trump’s company. So the more he went, the more he got. Since 2017, Trump’s company has charged taxpayers for hotel rooms, ballrooms, cottages, rental houses, golf carts, votive candles, floating candles, candelabras, furniture moving, resort fees, decorative palm trees, strip steak, chocolate cake, breakfast buffets, $88 bottles of wine and $1,000 worth of liquor for White House aides. And water.

Yes, water:

President Trump welcomed the Japanese prime minister at Mar-a-Lago, in front of a towering arrangement of roses. The two could have met in Washington, but Trump said his private club was a more comfortable alternative. “It is, indeed, the Southern White House,” Trump said, greeting Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in front of the press in April 2018. For Trump, there was another, hidden benefit. Money. At Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s company would get paid to host his summit.

In the next two days, as Trump and Abe talked about trade and North Korea, Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., club billed the U.S. government $13,700 for guest rooms, $16,500 for food and wine and $6,000 for the roses and other floral arrangements.

Trump’s club even charged for the smallest of services. When Trump and Abe met alone, with no food served, the government still got a bill for what they drank. “Bilateral meeting,” the bill said. “Water.” $3 each.

At the same meeting with Abe, Mar-a-Lago reportedly charged the government thousands of dollars for accommodations for staffers, despite the fact that federal policy says the most the government could pay was $182. “[There’s] a five bedroom house that three of the senior staff are staying in at $2,600 per night,” State Department employee Michael Dobbs wrote in an email to his colleagues. “The two other Senior staffers (Bannon and Walsh) are expected to be charged $546 for their rooms.” From a logistical standpoint, hosting events at Mar-a-Lago, rather than the White House, is, as one former official put it to the Post, a “pain in the [posterier].” Also, if the Abe meeting, and others like it, were held at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Bannon and other White House employees would’ve simply stayed in their own homes. But, of course, that would mean there wasn’t anything in it for Trump. Plus, hosting them at the president’s for-profit properties means gouging the Secret Service:

When Trump visited Mar-a-Lago for two weeks at Christmas last year, for example, the club charged the Secret Service $32,400 for guest rooms. In addition, Trump’s adult children have brought their father’s company another $260,000 in taxpayer revenue on their own, records show, by taking solo trips to Trump properties with their own Secret Service agents in tow.

And, in some cases, Trump’s properties even got paid on days when no Trumps were present at all. In Bedminster, N.J., for instance, Trump’s club has charged the Secret Service $17,000 per month to rent a cottage from May to November—even on days when the family is absent. That’s an unusually high rate for the area, but a former Trump administration official said they had to pay it—to be ready, if Trump suddenly decided to visit. Defense Department records recently obtained by The Post show a similar pattern of $17,000 payments to Trump’s club in Bedminster in recent years. Pentagon officials declined to answer questions about whether they have a cottage there too.

As the Post notes, the Trump Organization has defended these payments in the past in two ways. The first is by claiming that the law says they have to charge the government, which ethics experts say is not true at all. (“There’s nothing that would prohibit any government employee, including the president, from offering the government something for free,” Don W. Fox, who was acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics in the Obama administration, told the publication.) The other argument is that while it has to charge the government something—which, again, it doesn’t—it only charges enough to cover costs. “If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free. Meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” Eric Trump told Yahoo Finance last year while trying to defend the president’s attempt to hold the G7 at his Miami resort. “If they were to go to a hotel across the street, they’d be charging them $500 a night, whereas, you know we charge them, like 50 bucks.” Obviously, though, that’s not true either:

Among the hundreds of transactions reviewed by the Post, there were about two dozen payments that came close to that description: On three occasions when Trump visited his hotel in Las Vegas, for instance, the Defense Department reported paying just $74.51 per night for rooms. The Defense Department declined to comment about those payments. But, in cases where the Post could determine what room rate was charged, the Trump Organization mostly appeared to charge the maximum allowed under federal spending rules. Or more.

At Mar-a-Lago, the government was charged rates ranging from $396.15 to $650 per room, according to documents obtained by the Post and people who have seen other, unredacted receipts. The rate for the cottage at Bedminster worked out to $566 per night. Once, when Donald Trump Jr. stopped at the Trump hotel in Vancouver, the Secret Service was charged $611 per night for his agents’ rooms. The Trump Organization has not commented on these higher charges. Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime “fixer” and attorney, said he saw no sign of a discount in those rates. “That’s what anybody coming in would pay,” said Cohen

And then there’s the matter of the Trump Organization funneling money from the campaign into its coffers. While campaign donations were used to pay Trump’s businesses in 2016, during that race, Trump put in $66 million of his own money. This time, he’s donated a paltry $8,020 as of October 14, while extracting $5.6 million—all the while begging for cash:

In recent months, something unexpected happened to Trump’s campaign—once called a “Death Star” by former campaign manager Brad Parscale. Several campaign officials have said they could use more money for television ads in the final stretch.

It started to run short of money. The campaign’s cash on hand shrank down to $43 million, far less than that of Democratic rival Joe Biden. That was surprisingly little, for a campaign that started raising money far earlier than past incumbents seeking reelection: Trump’s 2020 campaign had been fundraising since before Trump took office in 2017. The campaign has canceled TV ad buys in key states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio. In emails to prospective donors, Trump asked for money in capital letters. “You’ve never let me down before and I know you won’t start now,” Trump wrote on Sept. 23. “Contribute ANY AMOUNT RIGHT NOW.”

The next day, Trump’s campaign paid Trump’s business $40,000 in rent, for that space in Trump Tower.

In a separate report earlier this month, the Associated Press revealed that the campaign blew $1 billion on, among other things, private jet rides, legal fees, and Don Jr.’s book, Triggered.

Both the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign declined the Post’s request for comment. In a statement, White House spokesman Judd Deere said, “Any suggestion that the President has used his own official travel or the federal government as a way to profit off of taxpayers is an absolute disgrace and lie.”

Brett Kavanaugh previews how he’d help steal the election for Trump

Should the results be contested—and Trump has made it clear he hopes they will be—Justice Beer Bong has a plan:

Moments before Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed as Donald Trump’s third appointee to the US Supreme Court, a divided ruling from the nation’s highest court said that mail-in ballots in Wisconsin that arrive after Election Day, even if they’re post-marked in time, are invalid. The court’s decision on Monday blocked a federal judge’s order that allowed election officials to continue counting mail-in ballots that were postmarked by Election Day on 3 November and received no later than 9 November, following a coronavirus pandemic that has altered voting capacity as delays continue to plague the U.S. Postal Service.

Voting rights advocates and legal analysts fear that conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh has signaled the conservative majority court’s willingness to stop counting ballots on election night—and overrule state decisions to expand ballot access. Justice Kavanaugh argued that state courts “do not have a blank check to rewrite state election laws for federal elections” and suggested that “chaos and suspicions of impropriety” would follow if “thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election.”

Incidentally, the article Kavanaugh cited in his argument goes on to say that states should extend the deadlines for ballots, but apparently that’s neither here nor there. In his concurrence, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, backed up Kavanaugh, writing: “The Constitution provides that state legislatures—not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials—bear primary responsibility for setting election rules.” Chief Justice John Roberts suggested he didn’t agree with his colleagues, but given Barrett’s ascension, Kavanaugh et al. would presumably have the votes to swing things in Trump’s favor, should it come to that.

Oh look, it appears the president might’ve cheated on his taxes again

According to a report from the New York Times, Trump owed various financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank, $287 million, a majority of which was related to the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. When the majority of it was miraculously and unusually forgiven, it should have triggered a large tax bill. But, surprise:

How Mr. Trump found trouble in Chicago, and maneuvered his way out of it, is a case study in doing business the Trump way. When the project encountered problems, he tried to walk away from his huge debts. For most individuals or businesses, that would have been a recipe for ruin. But tax-return data, other records and interviews show that rather than warring with a notoriously litigious and headline-seeking client, lenders cut Mr. Trump slack—exactly what he seemed to have been counting on…. Ultimately, Mr. Trump’s lenders forgave much of what he owed.

Those forgiven debts are now part of a broader investigation of Mr. Trump’s business by the New York attorney general. They normally would have generated a big tax bill, since the Internal Revenue Service treats canceled debts as income. Yet as has often happened in his long career, Mr. Trump appears to have paid almost no federal income tax on that money, in part because of large losses in his other businesses, the Times’s analysis of his tax records found.

In a statement, Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, told the Times that Trump and the company paid all necessary taxes on the forgiven debt. “These were all arm’s length transactions that were voluntarily entered into between sophisticated parties many years ago in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis and the resulting collapse of the real estate markets,” Garten said.

You’ll never believe it but a federal agency was forced to cancel an LGBTQ+ event because the president thinks diversity and inclusion are “propaganda”

Diversity and inclusion? Not in Donald Trump’s America! Per the HuffPo:

The Environmental Protection Agency canceled a virtual event on LGBTQ pride and resilience that was to be given by an 84-year-old psychologist and longtime gay rights activist, because of President Donald Trump’s executive order banning diversity training, HuffPost has learned. The event, “What LGBT Pride and Resilience Can Teach Us About Navigating COVID and Beyond,” was scheduled for Oct. 7. But a month before that, in a memo, the White House ordered federal agencies to stop holding diversity trainings, which it called “divisive, anti-American propaganda.” In a subsequent order, Trump extended the ban to all companies that contract with, or receive funding from, the federal government.

Though the orders appear to mostly concern trainings that focus on race and sex, the bans have had a far more broad effect, as the EPA action shows. “What’s so insidious and tyrannical about the executive orders and memos and guidances is they just cast such a broad net that anything falling into diversity and inclusion is now under threat,” one EPA employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, told HuffPost. “People are afraid of getting in trouble because it’s like [a] McCarthyism communist Red Scare.”

In a statement, EPA spokesman James Hewitt claimed he wasn‘t “familiar with” the scrapped event, adding that the “EPA is committed to ensuring that all employees fully understand the laws and policies regarding civil rights, affirmative action, and equal access/equal opportunity. All EPA employees are expected to be familiar with and have a full understanding of the federal laws relating to civil rights.” Yet, according to HuffPo, the agency also canceled several internal events looking at how pollution disproportionately affects the poor and people of color.

Womp, womp: Judge rules Trump can be sued in rape defamation case

The Justice Department’s claim that Trump was acting in his capacity as president when he called E. Jean Carroll a liar, and thus was protected from litigation, has been shot down:

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that President Trump can be personally sued for defamation in connection with his denial while in office of a decades-old rape allegation. The judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan, rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to step into the case and defend the president. His ruling means that, for the moment, a lawsuit by the writer E. Jean Carroll can move forward against Mr. Trump, in his capacity as a private citizen. Ms. Carroll has accused Mr. Trump of raping her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Her lawsuit claims he harmed her reputation when he denied the attack last year and branded her a liar.

Last month, the Justice Department abruptly intervened on Mr. Trump’s behalf in the suit, which had been filed in state court in New York, citing a law designed to protect federal employees against litigation stemming from the performance of their duties. Under that law, the Federal Tort Claims Act, the department sought to move Ms. Carroll’s suit to federal court and to substitute the United States for Mr. Trump as the defendant—a move that would have likely led to the dismissal of the charges…. But Judge Kaplan, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, ruled against the department’s maneuver, saying Mr. Trump was not acting in his official capacity when he denied the accusation.

“His comments concerned an alleged sexual assault that took place several decades before he took office, and the allegations have no relationship to the official business of the United States,” Kaplan wrote. Which is obviously insane for a federal judge to have to point out, but that’s the Trump administration for you.

Elsewhere!

Early-voting surge scrambles Election Day expectations as some states gallop toward 2016 turnout levels (Washington Post)

After supporting Trump by one vote in 2016, a Wisconsin community reassesses (Washington Post)

Seven days to go and 14 Senate seats up for grabs (Washington Post)

“So far, the count stands at 3,367 blue cookies, 18,241 red” (New York Times)

Cuomo Seeks to Keep 95% of U.S. Out of New York as Virus Rages (Bloomberg)

COVID’s cognitive costs? Some patients’ brains may age 10 years (Reuters)

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey: A Hands-Off CEO in a Time of Turmoil (Wall Street Journal)

200-pound tortoise is back home after escaping Alabama pen (AP)

Man uses mouth to bounce table tennis ball off wall for Guinness record (UPI)

— Progressives Are Going Rogue to Flip Pennsylvania for Biden
— White House Reporters Fume Over Team Trump’s “Reckless” COVID Response
— Why Anti–Trump Attack Ads Might Actually Be Helping Him
— Tax Mess Aside, Can Trump Pay Off His $1 Billion in Debt?
— News Media Begins to Contemplate a Post–Trump White House
— The Kimberly Guilfoyle Sexual Harassment Allegations Get Even Darker
— As Trump Falters, Democrats See an Expanding 2020 Senate Map
— From the Archive: Inside Trump’s Twisted, Epic Battle for Mar-a-Lago
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.