News has come out that in a visit last year to Toronto to meet with Prince Harry, Melania Trump ran up a bill of over $174,000. She did not spend the night, leaving after just over 12 hours. That's over $14,000 spent every hour.
The First Lady was in Canada with the British prince to meet the athletes for the Invictus Games, an event for disabled veterans started by Prince Harry. However, people weren't expecting such an extravagant bill for a quick trip like this.
That leaves the question, what was the money spent on?
The bills are broken down on the USAspending.gov website, where each expense is listed as going to "Miscellaneous Foreign Awardees" for the FLOTUS's hotel accommodations. The six transactions range from $12,000 to $49,000. No hotel names are listed.
While the spokeswoman for the First Lady, Stephanie Grisham implied that an advance team was part of the expenditure, Quartz found that they were recorded separately for only $18,000.
Transportation for this half-day trip came out to a little over $21,000. By contrast, former first lady, Michelle Obama spent a little over $18,000 on transportation for a ten day trip in Denmark in 2009.
The news has not been taken well.
This is not the first time Melania has been in hot water for excessive government spending. Earlier this month, it was reported that Mrs. Trump spent $95,000 for an overnight trip to Cairo. However that reporting was slammed by Grisham for being inaccurate. The First Lady did not in fact stay the night and was only there for six hours.
The amount, however, was not disputed.
H/T: Quartz, Huffington Post
Jane Rosenberg
Jane Rosenberg
@arianagrande/Instagram
@arianagrande/Instagram