Donald Trump’s string of stiffing municipalities and local governments for the massive bills accumulated by those agencies for his cult rallies continues, with the city of Pickens and Pickens County in South Carolina having to dip into their tourism budget to cover $30,000 in security costs for a July rally Trump’s campaign refuses to pay for, the Greenville News reports.
There are a number of outstanding claims from local governments against the Trump campaign for rallies Trump held but which never got paid for excess salaries for the police and civil servants who had to put in additional hours to accommodate Trump’s vanity events to placate his wounded ego. Of 30 municipalities where Trump held rallies since the November 2020 election, only one–Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania–reported the Trump camp has no outstanding invoices for the rallies.
In Pickens County, however, things are a little more complicated. Tight budgets caused the city of Pickens to pull back on their plan to sent $10,000 to the county to pay for costs. Instead, the city is going to try to collect directly from the Trump campaign, a move some county officials want to piggyback on to save their valuable taxpayer funds. “If the city of Pickens is sending an invoice to the campaign to be reimbursed, it only makes sense to me that the county’s expenses should be billed to the city so that they can include that as part of their total invoice,” County Councilwoman Claiborne Linvill said, noting that setting the precedent of having taxpayers pay for security for all political rallies would end up being very costly.