Okay. It’s very simple: When the government disburses money to its employees in the form of a salary, the transaction where the taxpayer is concerned is concluded. The taxpayer has paid the employee for services rendered. What that employee does with that salary after that isn’t the taxpayer’s business, since the taxpayer already got what they paid for.
To put it another way, you wouldn’t argue that Doris from the DMV is “spending taxpayer money” when she spends some of her salary on a pedicure and claim it’s the equivalent of a presidential golfing trip, or that a soldier buying a case of beer with his salary is a waste of tax money. Because you are paying them for the job they did.
In other words, it’s not fucking taxpayer money anymore.
It is, however, still taxpayer money when it is part of an account set aside for expenses incurred in the execution of one’s duties, and the President uses it to pay himself for taking vacations, and to pay himself again for the taxpayer-provided security detail.
And even if I were to play your stupid false equivalence game: At $300 per console and a game price of $59.99, AOC would have to buy 369,455 Nintendo Switches with a copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons for each to reach the $133 million racked up by Trump’s golf trips. So even if you were to blubber about how it’s all a tragic loss of taxpayer money either way, there’s your fucking difference you goddamn moron.
