WASHINGTON — In the past few months, President Donald Trump has invited supporters wearing “Make America Great Again” campaign gear onstage with him during official presidential speeches. He has criticized Democratic rival Joe Biden in Rose Garden addresses. He has played campaign-style videos in the White House briefing room, and he 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 business with campaign activity. But government watchdogs and officials from past administrations warn that Trump has smashed that norm, showing an unusual willingness to use his presidential platform for political purposes.
Trump’s penchant for blurring the lines between his campaign and his official duties came to a head last week when he confirmed that he was considering giving his acceptance speech 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 mine live from the White House,” Trump said on Fox News. “The easiest, least expensive and, I think, very beautiful [location] would be live from the White House.”
Presidential ethics veterans said the savings weren’t his to take. “What Trump is doing is a form of stealing,” said Norm Eisen, who was President Barack Obama’s special counsel and special assistant for ethics and government reform.
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“The taxpayer entrusts funds to the government to do the official business of the government. If they want to support a political candidate, they make a political contribution,” he said. “For Trump to effectively be reaching into all of our pockets to subsidize his proposed activity on the South Lawn … no, the taxpayer should not have to pay for that.”
Trump’s boundary stretching goes beyond the location of his acceptance speech, Eisen and others said.
The president has increasingly turned official White House events, both in Washington and on the road, into political events as the coronavirus pandemic has kept him off the usual campaign trail and unable to hold large in-person rallies.
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 to Trump’s re-election.
“It’s always been a fine line that presidents ride with making sure that the official activity in an election year does not go too far into 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 disguising it as official activity.”
On an official government trip to Texas in July, for example, a senior administration official told NBC News that the visit was intended to highlight Trump’s energy policy and contrast it with that of Biden’s. On another official White House trip in June, to Arizona, the president headlined an event hosted by Students for Trump at a Phoenix church.
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On his most recent presidential trip last week, to Ohio, the White House said Trump was met on Air Force One by a campaign senior adviser in the state, Bob Paduchik. The president held a small campaign-style rally on the tarmac and then visited a Whirlpool factory, where he made fun of Biden (“Did you ever watch Biden, where he’s always saying the wrong state?”). He rounded out the journey with a supporters roundtable and a campaign fundraiser.
The trips can become expensive when the airfare and the cost of federally mandated Secret Service protection are taken into consideration.
When a presidential trip involves both official and political events, the White House is supposed to use a formula to determine the amount of money that the campaign or the party should reimburse to the Treasury Department to protect taxpayers from paying for any political activities. The formula generally is not made public.
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A spokesperson for the Federal Election Commission said that to distinguish political travel from official travel, the White House should consider the purposes and the natures 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 since May for airfare. Neither the Trump campaign nor the RNC provided NBC News with a breakdown of which trips taxpayers were reimbursed for.
Trump has also officially hosted a number of constituent-based events at the White House since the pandemic hit, involving truck drivers, farmers, veterans and seniors — a key 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 propelled Trump to victory in 2016 but whose support this time around has softened.
The campaign has pushed back against criticism that the president is misusing White House events.
“Democrats and the media are desperate to muzzle President Trump. They don’t want him tweeting, they don’t want him holding rallies, they don’t want him speaking at Mount Rushmore, and now they don’t want him holding press conferences,” said Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director. “Every week, Joe Biden reads speeches off the teleprompter attacking the president and the media gleefully reports every word, and President Trump is entitled to fight back.”
While there are some clear rules governing what sort of political activity the president can engage in on official trips and on the White House grounds (he cannot make fundraising calls from the Oval Office, for example), many of the president’s political actions are guided by tradition and norms.
The Hatch Act, a law limiting the political activities that federal employees can engage in to ensure that federal policies are carried out in a nonpartisan fashion and to protect federal workers from political coercion, does not apply to the president.
Officials from previous administrations say decoupling the political from the policy can be difficult, and many relied on White House lawyers, advisers and watchdogs to avoid Hatch Act and ethics violations.
“They were afraid of losing Congress, so they pushed the envelope on a bunch of things,” said Richard Painter, a Trump critic who was the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, recalling the 2006 midterm elections, when he frequently had to push back on some actions by administration officials.
Still, said Greg Jenkins, who was Bush’s deputy assistant and director of White House advance, “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 particular policies or proposals. While those are done for political purposes — to persuade people to your side — they weren’t electioneering,” Jenkins said.
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Johanna Maska, Obama’s White House director of press advance from 2009 to 2015, said she and other officials would get regular Hatch Act and ethics training from the White House counsel.
Maska said she recalled discussions during the 2012 campaign about whether using Obama’s official armored podium with the presidential seal at political events was an example of undue influence and a burden on taxpayers. Ultimately, the campaign decided to buy its own armored podium for Obama to use at events, which, Maska recalled, was expensive.
“Our typical default was we wanted to pay for everything to make sure we were following the law and weren’t making any in-kind contributions,” Maska said.
Eisen, the special counsel to Obama, said establishing a strict set of rules on the use of Air Force One and reimbursements, among other ethics issues, was a “huge priority” for the administration. “I personally trained everyone in the White House on these rules so they wouldn’t break them,” he said.
Eisen recalled telling Pete Rouse, a senior adviser to Obama who is an avid Grateful Dead fan, that he had to take down an Obama poster hanging in his office signed by the band because “there can be no taint of politics in this workplace, which is for policy.”
Government watchdogs say Trump has strayed far from the ethics norms of past administrations. They say he sets a dangerous precedent that could erode public trust.
“There are all sorts of debates, and the thing I was proud about is that our counsel would challenge us to make sure we were making the best decision for the taxpayers,” Maska said. “My question is: What is this counsel doing?”
EDMONTON – Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says her government’s $8.6-billion plan to fast-track building new schools will include a pilot project to incentivize private ones.
Smith said the ultimate goal is to create thousands of new spaces for an exploding number of new students at a reduced cost to taxpayers.
“We want to put all of the different school options on the same level playing field,” Smith told a news conference in Calgary Wednesday.
Smith did not offer details about how much private school construction costs might be incentivized, but said she wants to see what independent schools might pitch.
“We’re putting it out there as a pilot to see if there is any interest in partnering on the same basis that we’ll be building the other schools with the different (public) school boards,” she said.
Smith made the announcement a day after she announced the multibillion-dollar school build to address soaring numbers of new students.
By quadrupling the current school construction budget to $8.6 billion, the province aims to offer up 30 new schools each year, adding 50,000 new student spaces within three years.
The government also wants to build or expand five charter school buildings per year, starting in next year’s budget, adding 12,500 spaces within four years.
Currently, non-profit independent schools can get some grants worth about 70 per cent of what students in public schools receive per student from the province.
However, those grants don’t cover major construction costs.
John Jagersma, executive director of the Association of Independent Schools and Colleges of Alberta, said he’s interested in having conversations with the government about incentives.
He said the province has never directly funded major capital costs for their facilities before, and said he doesn’t think the association has ever asked for full capital funding.
He said community or religious groups traditionally cover those costs, but they can help take the pressure off the public or separate systems.
“We think we can do our part,” Jagersma said.
Dennis MacNeil, head of the Public School Boards Association of Alberta, said they welcome the new funding, but said money for private school builds would set a precedent that could ultimately hurt the public system.
“We believe that the first school in any community should be a public school, because only public schools accept all kids that come through their doors and provide programming for them,” he said.
Jason Schilling, president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, said if public dollars are going to be spent on building private schools, then students in the public system should be able to equitably access those schools.
“No other province spends as much money on private schools as Alberta does, and it’s at the detriment of public schools, where over 90 per cent of students go to school,” he said.
Schilling also said the province needs about 5,000 teachers now, but the government announcement didn’t offer a plan to train and hire thousands more over the next few years.
Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi on Tuesday praised the $8.6 billion as a “generational investment” in education, but said private schools have different mandates and the result could be schools not being built where they are needed most.
“Using that money to build public schools is more efficient, it’s smarter, it’s faster, and it will serve students better,” Nenshi said.
Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides’ office declined to answer specific questions about the pilot project Wednesday, saying it’s still under development.
“Options and considerations for making capital more affordable for independent schools are being explored,” a spokesperson said. “Further information on this program will be forthcoming in the near future.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2024.
OTTAWA – Health Minister Mark Holland urged a committee of senators Wednesday not to tweak the pharmacare bill he carefully negotiated with the NDP earlier this year.
The bill would underpin a potential national, single-payer pharmacare program and allow the health minister to negotiate with provinces and territories to cover some diabetes and contraceptive medications.
It was the result of weeks of political negotiations with the New Democrats, who early this year threatened to pull out of their supply-and-confidence deal with the Liberals unless they could agree on the wording.
“Academics and experts have suggested amendments to this bill to most of us here, I think,” Independent Senator Rosemary Moodie told Holland at a meeting of the Senate’s social affairs committee.
Holland appeared before the committee as it considers the bill. He said he respects the role of the Senate, but that the pharmacare legislation is, in his view, “a little bit different.”
“It was balanced on a pinhead,” he told the committee.
“This is by far — and I’ve been involved in a lot of complex things — the most difficult bit of business I’ve ever been in. Every syllable, every word in this bill was debated and argued over.”
Holland also asked the senators to move quickly to pass the legislation, to avoid lending credence to Conservative critiques that the program is a fantasy.
When asked about the Liberals’ proposed pharmacare program for diabetes and birth control, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has often responded that the program isn’t real. Once the legislation is passed, the minister must negotiate with every provincial government to actually administer the program, which could take many months.
“If we spend a long time wordsmithing and trying to make the legislation perfect, then the criticism that it’s not real starts to feel real for people, because they don’t actually get drugs, they don’t get an improvement in their life,” Holland told the committee.
He told the committee that one of the reasons he signed a preliminary deal with his counterpart in British Columbia was to help answer some of the Senate’s questions about how the program would work in practice.
The memorandum of understanding between Ottawa and B.C. lays out how to province will use funds from the pharmacare bill to expand on its existing public coverage of contraceptives to include hormone replacement therapy to treat menopausal symptoms.
The agreement isn’t binding, and Holland would still need to formalize talks with the province when and if the Senate passes the bill based on any changes the senators decide to make.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2024.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia’s NDP are accusing the government of prioritizing landlords over residents who need an affordable place to live, as the opposition party tables a bill aimed at addressing the housing crisis.
NDP Leader Claudia Chender took aim at the Progressive Conservatives Wednesday ahead of introducing two new housing bills, saying the government “seems to be more focused on helping wealthy developers than everyday families.”
The Minister of Service Nova Scotia has said the government’s own housing legislation will “balance” the needs of tenants and landlords by extending the five per cent cap on rent until the end of 2027. But critics have called the cap extension useless because it allows landlords to raise rents past five per cent on fixed-term leases as long as property owners sign with a new renter.
Chender said the rules around fixed-term leases give landlords the “financial incentive to evict,” resulting in more people pushed into homelessness. She also criticized the part of the government bill that will permit landlords to issue eviction notices after three days of unpaid rent instead of 15.
The Tories’ housing bill, she said, represents a “shocking admission from this government that they are more concerned with conversations around landlord profits … than they are about Nova Scotians who are trying to find a home they can afford.”
The premier’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Also included in the government’s new housing legislation are clearer conditions for landlords to end a tenancy, such as criminal behaviour, disturbing fellow tenants, repeated late rental payments and extraordinary damage to a unit. It will also prohibit tenants from subletting units for more than they are paying.
The first NDP bill tabled Wednesday would create a “homelessness task force” to gather data to try to prevent homelessness, and the second would set limits on evictions during the winter and for seniors who meet income eligibility requirements for social housing and have lived in the same home for more than 10 years.
The NDP has previously tabled legislation that would create a $500 tax credit for renters and tie rent control to housing units instead of the individual.
Earlier this week landlords defended the use of the contentious fixed-term leases, saying they need to have the option to raise rent higher than five per cent to maintain their properties and recoup costs. Landlord Yarviv Gadish, who manages three properties in the Halifax area, called the use of fixed-term leases “absolutely essential” in order to keep his apartments presentable and to get a return on his investment.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2024.
