Residents of a Loudoun County, Virginia, neighborhood say repeated visits by Trump to his golf club in Sterling have disrupted their day-to-day activities, while county officials are evaluating the mounting financial toll of providing the Secret Service with local security assistance.
Mara Moreland, who lives near Trump National Golf Club, said the neighborhood has been shut down four times since January, preventing her and others from entering or leaving their homes.
Moreland says she has been denied access to her house even when showing identification.
“I tried to show them my ID. I tried to tell them that I live here,” she explained. “They basically said to me, ‘Nobody in, nobody out.'”
“It doesn’t matter who we voted for. We just want to be able to access our house,” Moreland said.
County officials are also looking at the costs of providing security assistance during Trump’s visits. The county sheriff’s office, which has coordinated with the U.S. Secret Service, said the costs are putting a strain on its overtime budget, and not receiving any reimbursement.
Julie Briskman, who lives near the golf course is also the Algonkian District supervisor and chair of the county’s finance committee.
“It feels like an increased presence of our local law enforcement. It feels different than it did in the first term,” she told WUSA9.
She has requested a detailed report on how much the county has spent on these visits.
“With everything going on with quote-unquote waste, fraud, and abuse, I decided that we should figure out how much this is costing the county,” Briskman said.
“If it’s a campaign event, then your campaign should be funding the security,” she said. “If it’s an official White House presidential event, then I can understand spending taxpayer dollars on it, but in a transparent way.”
Briskman said that a Florida sheriff near Mar-a-Lago is requesting $45 million from his board of commissioners for protecting Trump during his visits, and said that Virginia taxpayers would not be happy about spending that kind of money from local funding.
