All these Trumps are getting damned expensive.

Last month, taxpayers forked over nearly $100,000 to protect Eric Trump while he was on a business trip to Uruguay. And the Defense Department is looking to rent space in Trump Tower — which goes for as much as $1.5 million a year per floor — so they can bring the nuclear launch codes along when the president comes to visit his wife in New York.

The mere idea of Donald Trump and the nuclear codes is way more disturbing than the money. But still, critics claim that Melania Trump’s decision not to move into the White House is costing the country more in security than the annual budget for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Melania is staying in New York so her son, Barron, can continue at his school. Presumably, the bill will drop somewhat over the summer. Meanwhile, the city police and the Secret Service have wrapped an incredibly expensive security blanket around a chunk of Fifth Avenue.

Of course she’s totally within her rights. One of the rules for criticizing a first family is that you leave the kids alone. (I am not thinking here of Eric.) If Melania decides never to become part of official Washington at all, that’s fine. There’s plenty of precedent. Zachary Taylor’s wife, Margaret, hated the whole idea so much that when Taylor died in office, the engraving of the deathbed scene showed Mrs. Taylor with her hands over her face in grief, because nobody knew what she actually looked like.