It was a tropical, airless June evening when the high priests of the Trump administration assembled to toast Sarah Huckabee Sanders stepping down as press secretary after more than two years in the White House. Drinks flowed beneath sparkling chandeliers as Sanders’s predecessor, Sean Spicer, mugged for the camera in the presence of eight current cabinet members, a couple dozen White House staffers, and a few congressional leaders to raise a glass to Sanders. The 100-plus attendees were also, of course, paying tribute to the venue’s owner, Donald Trump, who has refused to divest his stake in the Trump International Hotel or his other businesses. As the president gave a brief speech honoring his outgoing staffer, an estimated $5,000 to $7,000 made its way to his hotel’s coffers. (A person with knowledge of the event thought Sanders and her husband picked up the tab.) Nearby, the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, smiled. With a 7.425% stake in the hotel, she has reported more than $7.8 million in income over the past two years from the Trump DC property alone.

During the Clinton years, farewell parties had always been held in the White House, according to a former official, and they were “always nonextravagant.” But this is the new normal in Washington. Nearly three years after Trump’s election and the subsequent hand-wringing over the president’s eagerness to accept money from, well, anybody, his Pennsylvania Avenue hotel is so ensconced as a DC power hot spot that it might as well have been part of Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s original plan for the city. For an endless stream of lobbyists, GOP operatives, far right media personalities, tourists, and foreign officials, the Trump International Hotel is the epicenter of the MAGA universe. The favor trading and payola may be more brazen than ever. And yet the whiff of scandal is off. Legal attempts to brand Trump’s command of the hotel as emoluments violations seem unlikely to be resolved during this term, and it’s rare to see a protest outside the hotel other than projecting phrases like “felons welcome here” across the façade. The day after the Sanders party, Playbook reported on the event like any other social gathering. (“SPOTTED...President Donald Trump (who stopped by after a fundraiser to offer a brief toast), Ivanka Trump, Energy Secretary Rick Perry...”)

But of course, the Trump DC hotel is no regular hot spot. For the past two years, I have been staking out the Old Post Office Building, sometimes in person, often on social media, for my newsletter, 1100 Pennsylvania, in which I track who is pouring money into the president’s coffers. The night of Sanders’s send-off, for example, Spicer also posed in the lobby for a photo with a Nigerian dignitary, Dr. Christian Nwachukwu. A few days later, Nigerian Vice President Yemi Osinbajo would also appear at the hotel, conducting an interview from a signature suite, following in the footsteps of the former Nigerian vice president, Atiku Abubakar, who also stopped by in the homestretch of his campaign for president. Abubakar lost, but claimed election fraud and hired U.S. lobbyists to get the Trump administration to become involved. While it hasn’t contested the results, the U.S. State Department did slap visa restrictions on unnamed Nigerian politicians ”believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, undermining democracy.”⁠ Abubakar, in turn, said those sanctions vindicated his allegations.⁠

Nigeria isn’t alone in patronizing Trump properties. Joining Osinbajo and Abubakar have been Romania’s president and prime minister, Kenya’s second lady, Malaysia’s since-indicted former prime minister, and embassies for Kuwait and the Philippines. The Washington Post reported that Saudi-funded lobbyists booked an estimated 500 nights there, over a period of three months, at a cost of more than $270,000. In DC, as part of a delegation to discuss bilateral trade with the president at the White House, Pakistan’s minister for maritime affairs also attended meetings on trade at Trump’s hotel⁠. Facing lawsuits for emoluments violations, the Trump Organization has donated more than $340,000 to the U.S. Treasury over the past two years, which it claims are its profits from business with foreign governments. But its explanation for how it calculates the figure acknowledges it’s flawed, in part by requiring guests to self-report if they are with a foreign government. And the Trump Org hasn’t revealed if that figure is independently audited, nor has it shared the receipts.