Trump’s Washington, DC, hotel on Pennsylvania Ave has made a whopping $2 million in profits since the beginning of the year, according to Wall Street Journal.
The Trump International Hotel opened last fall—just about the time Trump was cementing his spot as Commander in Chief—right down the street from the White House in the building that was once the first DC post office. While the company projected to lose $2.1 million in the first quarter of 2017, the hotel actually ended up pulling in around $18 million, leaving a cool $1.92 million in profits. The Journal says that $8.2 million of the take came from drinks and food alone.
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The hotel is one of the most expensive in DC, with an average nightly room fee of over $650, and quickly became a hub for Trump’s various pals and idolators. It’s also brought in conservative fundraisers, tourists, and a steady stream of Beltway Republican politicians since it opened last year. The hotel’s visitor logs are private, but a Washington Post reporter recently spent a month in the hotel lobby, brushing shoulders with Newt Gingrich, Sean Spicer, and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who recently lived in the hotel for six months.
Trump forked over leadership for the Trump Organization to Don Jr. and Eric Trump at the beginning of the year, kinda-sorta-but-not-actually divesting himself from his businesses, but the whole thing is still a “highly unethical arrangement,” according to Oregon Democratic representative Peter DeFazio—especially since the US government also owns the historic building that houses the hotel.
“What makes all of this particularly galling,” DeFazio wrote in a statement earlier this summer, “is that we now have the unprecedented situation where the President of the United States is both the landlord and tenant of a federal building.”
The Trump administration declined to comment on the financial reports, but in an email to the Post, Eric Trump simply said, “We are very proud of the success of the project.”
