For all the talk about Donald Trump as a blue collar billionaire, all the pictures of him looking like Wario while he eats KFC will never change the fact that he's always most comfortable when surrounded by rich people like him. Part of that comfort comes from the fact that he spends that time behind closed doors at his own private clubs, so no one can listen to the way he talks to those friends. Now some newly leaked audio has revealed he likes them more than you, and invites them to help him pick members of his government. Drain that motherfucking swamp, baby!

Politico got their hands on some leaked audio of Trump celebrating his election win with members of the Trump National Golf Club, in an impromptu speech he gave to the club members on November 18th last year. While doing a rich guy ramble about golfing and the same vague campaign bullshit he deployed on the trail about "working on ISIS," Trump calls the golf club members "my real group" and "the special people." He also pointed out a club member, possibly NASDAQ CEO Bob Greifeld, and relayed a conversation they had: "We were just talking about who we [are] going to pick for the FCC, who [are] we going to pick for this, who we gonna accept -- boy, can you give me some recommendations?”



Trump also invited club members to "come around" for his interviews with potential nominees for Secretary of State, Treasury Secretary and other positions. Beyond that, the next most shocking thing from the tape is that he doesn't talk about his huge (not at all actually huge) Electoral College victory, a meme/tic he'd pick up later into his presidency.

The audio leak comes at a somewhat inopportune time for Trump, as his latest jaunt down to Mar-a-Lago, which as we all know is another private club he owns, coincides with that whole thing where members of the club watched his idiotic staff point unsecured phones at classified documents he looked at while trying to figure out how to respond to a North Korean missile launch.

It also comes on the heels of the Times taking look at all the rich club members trying to influence government decision-making. The Times points out a number of members of the club, like petroleum magnate and Keystone XL advocate William Koch, home builder and Toll Brothers co-founder Bruce Toll and Rockstar energy drink CFO Janet Weiner (who wants the government to lay off regulating energy drinks), all of whom could benefit from decisions Trump makes as president and have expanded access to him due to his frequent trips to the club.

Even as the club's managing director told the Times that Trump's presidency "enhances" the value of membership in the club, everyone interviewed took pains to make it appear that paying to belong to a private club that the president runs can't possibly factor into them getting exclusive access to talk government programs with the president. That claim is contrasted by, for example, Toll telling the Times that he and Trump talked about Trump's infrastructure plan ideas. Or another member, real estate developer Richard LeFrak, telling the paper that Trump once started to him talking about the potential cost of the border wall (that Mexico will pay us back for one day) and how he didn't believe it could possibly cost all that much:

“He said, would I consider doing it? And then he suggested that the price that was being quoted in the media seemed absurdly high to him,” Mr. LeFrak said. He is not interested in the work, but said, “And I didn’t react to him one way or the other because I don’t know what the facts are.” Mr. LeFrak said to the president, "I thought you were going to have homeland security deal with this," he recalled, describing Mr. Trump as stymied by the bureaucracy. "And he said, "Yes, maybe General Kelly will call you."

Just normal president stuff, offering up government contracts to your friends in your private club where you don't need to actually tell anyone who visited you, or why or when they did so.

“Mar-a-Lago represents a commercialization of the presidency that has few if any precedents in American history,” historian Jon Meacham told the paper. Hey, maybe Trump's name can be used on homework assignment as an example of how to use "precedent" in a sentence after all!

As for the president himself, he made sure to let everyone know that he would be having a whole bunch of meetings at Mar-a-Lago this weekend, just in case you were curious: