Spending at Trump Properties - The Process Behind the Visualization
I downloaded data regarding Trump’s political expenditures between April, 2015 and June, 2018 from ProPublica’s data portal. The full data set contains 1,194 entries regarding the expenditures of Trump and his affiliate agencies and committees at Trump-owned properties. The data details the amount of money they spent, the date on which they spent it, the purpose of their expenditure, and the property, city, and state where they made the payment.
I created a Pivot Table of the date and dragged the “property” category into the “Rows” section and the “amount” category into the “Values” section. I found that of the total $16,085,912 in expenditures, Trump and affiliate organizations spent $9,252,770 at Tag Air, Inc., an outlier quantity, which would make a good Factoid Story within the data.
I continued to analyze the implications of this outlying value and reorganized the Pivot Table so “property” and “date” were in the “Rows” section and “amount” was in the “Values” section. I found that Trump spent this $9 million between June 16. 2015 and Nov. 28, 2016 — entirely during his campaign.
I imported the data into Tableau and compared the “property” category to the “amount” category to get a visual idea of the degree to which Trump spent exceptionally large quantities of money at Tag Air Inc. The next largest expenditure by Trump and affiliates was at Trump Tower Commercial, LLC, where he spent less than $3 million, a fraction of his expenditures at Tag Air, Inc.
Finally, I compared the “quantity” and “amount” of Trump and his affiliate organizations’ expenditures to the “property” at which they spent the money. Trump and affiliates spent by far the most at Tag Air Inc. but only made 19 total payments to the company, averaging $486,988 per payment. They made 128 payments to the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, the most payments at one of his companies, but only spent $38,499 at the hotel, averaging $301 per payment.
Possible Angles:
Why did Trump spend over $9 million of his $16 million total payments to Tag Air Inc.? Why did he do so in only 19 payments? Does an average flight in one of his airlines cost $486,988? Does that include an entire trip? Is some of the money he is paying Tag Air Inc. actually used for other payments, but lumped into this broader category?
This process makes me wonder how accurately Trump kept records of his personal expenditures, given that almost 58% of his expenditures were made to Tag Air Inc. during his campaign in only 19 payments. If these records of Trump’s own political-related expenditures before he became president are inaccurate, are the records of the expenditures by departments in the executive branch in the first two years of his presidency (up to June, 2018) also inaccurate?
$13,542,492 of the $16,085,912 total expenditures were made out in Trump’s own name rather than under a department of the Executive Branch or other agencies in support of Trump’s political efforts. The next highest amount spent by a single agency was $974,809, by the Republican National Committee. Given this, is it possible for a non-wealthy individual to climb to the presidency?