President Donald Trump’s appearance at this year’s Super Bowl was billed by everyone from his most ardent fans to the mainstream media as nothing short of “historic,” which it was — he is the first sitting President to ever attend the event.
Missing from all this storytelling, however, is the main reason why this was a never-before-seen event. It is incredibly expensive, on a federal, state, and local level, for the President to appear anywhere — and it is our tax dollars that pay for it all.
Of course, unless you’re part of the teams who allocate taxpayer dollars and pay all the bills in Washington, it’s hard to have any real idea what a visit like Trump’s might have cost. Luckily, however, Republican outrage over former President Biden’s campaign stops, for instance, gives us an idea.
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For example, Republican North Carolina Congresswoman Virginia Foxx excoriated Biden in 2023 for a visit to a United Auto Workers picket line in Michigan that “cost taxpayers more than $20,000 Per Minute.”
Her press release about the matter, which is still live on the government website for the House Committee on Education and Workforce, states, “In 2022, the Air Force stated that the cost to operate Air Force One is $177,843 per flight hour or just over $2,964 per minute. …”
If those 2022 figures stand — and they’ve almost certainly gone up — then Trump’s flight from DC to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida and then on to New Orleans, totaling just shy of five hours or 300 minutes of flight time, cost American taxpayers nearly $890,000 at minimum. Huge thanks to Congresswoman Foxx and her fiscally minded Republican colleagues for helping us figure this out.
On top of a nearly million-dollar flight, Trump’s Super Bowl visit came with millions in security costs.
The nearly million-dollar Air Force One flight itself is just the tip of the iceberg because the costs of securing any location the President visits are frankly staggering. Books have been written on the subject, including by former Secret Service agents themselves, so we have an idea of what might have gone down in advance of the Super Bowl in this area of spending, too.
According to Jeffrey Robinson, a former Secret Service agent who wrote a book on the matter, the preparations for a presidential visit often begin months in advance, with federal agents meeting with state and local officials to secure the airspace around the location and coordinate with local law enforcement and emergency personnel to prepare for the possibility of an attack.
They’ll then do everything from tracking down potential local threats to background-checking staff at venues to blanketing the surrounding area with bomb-sniffing dogs. Add to that all of the people who travel with the President, and Robinson told The Oregonian, “Every time [the President] moves, thousands of people are involved.” Thousands of people on the government payroll, that is.
Oh — and that nearly million-dollar plane flight? It’s only one of at least six federal aircraft flying along with the President, including a second backup plane similar to Air Force One that parks nearby at a secret location in case the main one is compromised.
If you’ve ever wondered why so many people are invited to DC for Presidential photo ops in the Oval Office rather than the other way around — or why a President has never gone to the Super Bowl before — well, now you know.
This profligate use of taxpayer dollars comes as Elon Musk’s DOGE attacks ‘wasteful spending.’
Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s unelected bestie, has been brought to Washington to spearhead the efforts of his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which Musk claims has one main goal: tackling untold trillions of dollars worth of “wasteful spending.”
Among his first acts as head of DOGE has been attempts to illegally shutter USAID, an act he has no authority to perform (government agencies can only be dissolved by Congress), because of supposed abuses of taxpayer monies.
Most of Musk’s claims about these “wasteful” USAID expenditures, like money for a “DEI musical” in Ireland and a “transgender opera” in Colombia, are false — neither were funded by USAID but rather by small State Department grants. Others, like Musk’s claim that USAID spent $50 million sending condoms to Hamas, are completely made up. Others still are pet projects of Donald Trump himself, like a USAID “tourism” project in Egypt that is actually a water treatment initiative Trump commenced in 2019.
Also included among the supposedly “wasteful” expenditures of taxpayer dollars by USAID, according to Musk, is lifesaving medical research, including malaria and HIV vaccine projects that are funded in part because they help keep the entire world safe from disease, America included.
There’s absolutely no debate about whether “wasteful spending” exists in Washington — the fact that people have to post GoFundMe fundraisers for medical care is all the proof you need of that, for just one example. And there’s certainly a conversation to be had about foreign aid spending.
But the Trump Administration’s willingness to spend tens of millions of dollars of your money so he can go be applauded at a football game while calling medical research “wasteful,” pushing thousands of federal workers onto the unemployment line, and crowing about fabricated spending projects? Well, that sure is an interesting definition of “Government Efficiency.” Bit of a headscratcher, isn’t it? Almost seems like they’re lying…
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
