American Taxpayers Just Helped Pay for Ivanka Trump’s Birthday Trip

Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, got to take a nice birthday trip to Marrakesh, Morocco, with taxpayers helping to foot the bill.

The Daily Mail reports that Trump was spotted walking through the streets of the city on October 29, one day before her forty-fifth birthday. The newspaper obtained federal records showing two Secret Service contracts adding up to $93,000 for agents to secure and stay in two five-star hotels ahead of Trump’s arrival.

These included a $59,543 contract for rooms at the five-star Sofitel Marrakech, and a $33,457 contract for a Secret Service team at La Mamounia, where the Kardashian family and Winston Churchill have stayed. Those bills don’t include agents’ transportation, meals, flights, or salaries.

Officially, Ivanka Trump is not a White House employee, but she is entitled to Secret Service protection as a child of the president. The trip was reportedly not long, as the Daily Mail’s source said that she returned to the U.S. in time for Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Moroccan news outlet Le360 said that Trump was seen walking through Marrakech’s old neighborhoods and souks, and ate traditional Moroccan food. It’s her third visit to the country, according to the news outlet, as she visited on a diplomatic trip in November 2019 when she was an employee of the first Trump administration, and later in summer 2022 on a private trip with her husband, Jared Kushner.

Ivanka Trump’s net worth is estimated at $100 million. Even though she is entitled to Secret Service protection, at a time when many Americans are struggling (thanks to her father’s policies), she should be willing to reimburse the government for all of the high-end expenses she racked up in Morocco, as five-star hotels don’t come cheap. But perhaps we should be grateful that she didn’t stay at a Trump-owned property and force the Secret Service to fork over money to the family business, like her father often does.

After a disastrous midterm showing that placed the future of the MAGA movement in abject peril, the White House decided it was a good time to let conservative groups know that they were being watched.

A Thursday memo from the White House Office of Public Liaison sent to about 3,000 conservative organizations listed a series of Trump accomplishments, vowing that a Democratic Congress wouldn’t reverse them, according to The Wall Street Journal. But the memo ended with one sentence highlighted in yellow: “As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations.”

“‘We’re watching you’ is not the message the White House should be sending,” Caroline Sunshine, a White House aide during Trump’s first term, wrote online. “We’re LISTENING to you is what anyone in the WH who has the President’s best interest should be saying.”

Earlier emails from the White House office didn’t include language about “monitoring” groups, according to a review by the Journal. The shift comes as a flurry of conservative voices, from commentator Matt Walsh, to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to Vice President JD Vance himself, have lambasted President Trump’s policies and decision-making—placing sole blame on him for Republicans’ midterm election loss. And while the office told The Wall Street Journal that it wasn’t a threat, this is an ominous message to send to a coalition that is actively fracturing.

Republican Representative Thomas Massie says he has enough support to force a vote on his second Epstein Transparency Act.

“When we return next week, we’ll get 218 signatures for Epstein Files Transparency Act II, which guarantees a vote,” Massie wrote Thursday on X. “Survivors will be able to get their own records, State Attorneys General can prosecute crimes, and we can take the DOJ to court for keeping critical files hidden.”

Massie, who has made an enemy of Trump by opposing the Iran war and pushing for the full release of the Epstein files, first passed the Epstein Transparency Act in November 2025. And though President Trump signed it into law, Massie, Democrats, and a few Republicans argue that his administration didn’t fully abide with what the act required.

“The Department of Justice has flagrantly and consistently ignored EFTA’s disclosure requirements,” Massie wrote earlier this summer in his announcement of the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, co-sponsored by Democratic Senators Ben Ray Luján and Jeff Merkley, and Democratic Representatives Ro Khanna and Teresa Leger Fernández.

“The Department of Justice continues to unlawfully withhold over 3 million Epstein files that should be released to the public,” he continued. “In addition, the DOJ is unlawfully maintaining heavy redactions on the files it is releasing. State attorneys general and victims should have the right to sue the Attorney General of the United States to compel compliance with a transparency law President Trump signed.”

House Democrats are coming for law firms that cut deals with President Donald Trump.

Speaking on MS NOW Wednesday night, Representative Jamie Raskin, who is poised to become chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said that the several law firms that struck deals with Trump could expect to receive subpoenas next year.

In the early days of Trump’s second term, the president issued several executive orders revoking the security clearance of and threatening to pull all federal contracts from large law firms that had supported clients and causes he felt were contrary to his agenda. In response, nine firms agreed to degrading deals that gutted their work on certain policy areas such as immigration, ended company DEI programs, and required them to provide pro bono legal work for Trump’s administration. Altogether, the deals signed with the president amounted to nearly $1 billion worth of free legal work.

“There are major law firms in America, including Paul Weiss, that have capitulated to these coercive tactics from Donald Trump and have basically surrendered and made all sorts of outrageous concessions,” Raskin said on MS NOW.

Trump’s executive order had targeted Paul Weiss over the work of Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor who previously oversaw the Manhattan district attorney’s office’s investigation into Trump’s alleged financial crimes. As part of bowing to Trump’s threat, the firm acknowledged that Pomerantz had committed wrongdoing, and agreed to stop making decisions about hiring and promotions based on considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The current ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, Raskin had requested information from several firms about the exact details of their agreements; the answers they provided indicated that the president may have gotten the short end of the stick. While the firms had reportedly agreed to provide millions of dollars of pro bono work for specific causes, many asserted that they had total authority over the selection of their clients.

A group of Democratic lawmakers sent another series of letters to law firms earlier this year, warning that the Trump administration’s scheme to use “coercive and illegal measures” to blackmail firms could potentially violate federal laws against bribery, defrauding the public, and even racketeering.