The Washington Post reports:

President Trump returned to the White House from his private resort in Florida on Sunday. In total, Trump has spent all or part of 42 weekend days at the resort since his inauguration — time during which his schedule is almost always kept completely private.

Shortly after Trump was inaugurated, this was novel. When Trump’s press team called a lid on the day on Feb. 18, 2017 — meaning that Trump would not be doing anything else publicly — he nonetheless later attended a fundraising gala being hosted at the resort. How Trump spent his time at Mar-a-Lago had attracted considerable attention a few days earlier when it was revealed that Trump and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, then visiting Trump, had held an impromptu discussion about national security in the middle of the resort’s dining room.

Since then, though, Trump’s habit of simply dropping into Mar-a-Lago events barely warrants a mention. This weekend, he made another visit to a fundraiser at the club that wasn’t on his calendar. That’s just sort of how it goes.

It’s obviously useful for Mar-a-Lago to have Trump drop in at events on occasion — meaning that it’s indirectly valuable to Trump as well, given that he still owns the place. But it’s not Trump’s attendance at public fundraisers that really ought to raise eyebrows. It’s the rest of the time he spends chatting up whoever happens to be there. The time he spends greeting and schmoozing with the unidentified people who have paid him money to access the “winter White House.”

We got a vivid example of this over the weekend. Mother Jones magazine reported that a woman named Li Yang had been advertising her ability to get access to Trump — via Mar-a-Lago. [Continue reading…]