When Donald Trump demolished the historic East Wing of the White House to build his gaudy new ballroom,

he made the American people a promise.

He said the whole project would not cost the American taxpayer a dime.

Now, sure, like any construction project, it was going to cost money, and building Trump's ballroom was going to cost a lot of money, a whopping $400 million, but it was all

going to be paid for by wealthy people and big businesses, basically a generous gift out of the

kindness of their own hearts. Trump repeated that line over and over so much so that when his allies

eventually proposed spending an additional $1 billion of taxpayer money with a significant chunk

of the ballroom security for a significant chunk of the ballroom security, people freaked out.

Even many Republicans couldn't stomach spending a billion dollars of taxpayer money on things

like a ballroom. And this this week, they stripped that one billion

dollars from their big spending bill. But what if I told you this? The Trump administration

had already spent 50 times that much in taxpayer money to build his ballroom. What if I told you

Trump had already taken $50 billion out of the U.S. Treasury and spent it?

All is part of what looks very much like a pay-to-play scheme to finance his vanity project.

And I'm not making this up.

A brand new report from the government watchdog group, Public Citizen,

looked in to the private donors who are supposedly funding the Trump

ballroom as a gift. Guess what their investigation found. Quote, more than half of the

publicly identified donors to President Donald Trump's White House ballroom project have won

new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion during the past six months.

The report also found that most of those same companies are also facing federal enforcement

actions over alleged wrongdoing and that some have had such actions suspended by the Trump

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