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They really are determined to live out Idiocracy, aren’t they?

An official State Department website is promoting President Trump’s private club in Florida, with help from a number of State Department Facebook accounts.

An April 4 post on U.S. Department of State: Economic & Business Affairs’ Facebook page characterizes Mar-a-Lago as the “winter White House” and links to an article on the State Department’s Share America site. That article — entitled, “Mar-a-Lago: The winter White House” — explains that the club “has become well known as the president frequently travels there to work or host foreign leaders” and provides some history about the property.

But what it doesn’t mention is that Mar-a-Lago is perhaps the most obvious vehicle Trump is using to profit off the presidency. Trump broke precedent by not divesting from his business interests when he became president. Shortly after he took office, Mar-a-Lago membership fees doubled to $200,000. Trump traveled to Mar-a-Lago seven out of the first 12 full weekends after his inauguration, and mingled with members on numerous occasions. The message is clear — the price of a Mar-a-Lago membership buys access to the president.

[…] Unlike the White House or Camp David, Trump’s trips to Mar-a-Lago represent a huge cost for taxpayers — upwards of $3 million per trip. Nonetheless, Eric Trump recently compared his father’s visits to Mar-a-Lago to President George W. Bush’s trips to his ranch in Texas.

“I think being able to go to Mar-a-Lago, it is my father’s Crawford, Texas,” Eric, who is handling day-to-day management of the Trump Organization along with his brother Donald Jr., told the Irish publication Independent.ie. “Crawford was George W Bush’s ranch and Bush brought foreign leaders from all over the world [there]. He would go down to the ranch and they would drive a truck around and they would have fun and they would eat and that was his way of bonding.”
Eric Trump’s problematic endorsement of his dad’s foreign policy from the White House grounds

But Bush’s ranch wasn’t a private club. He and the foreign leaders he hosted were never placed in compromising situations where they had to handle a foreign crisis in full view of diners, as Trump and Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe did in February. Bush, who put his assets into a blind trust when he became president, didn’t charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for memberships to Crawford and then convey that buying one is a way to gain access to him.