On a Friday night in the last month of summer, you’d think that hotels – not least in Washington DC – would be fairly busy ahead of the weekend.
Yet that wasn’t the case for Trump International Hotel in the state, with researcher Robert Maguire revealing on Twitter that the giant lobby of the golden building was completely empty.
“The cavernous, empty lobby of Trump’s DC hotel at 8pm on a Friday night.
“It’s almost like people were using the president’s hotel as a way to put money in his pocket to curry flavour with him and his administration, and now that he’s no longer president, there’s no reason to go there,” he tweeted.
The scenes came a day after Forbes reporter Zach Everson revealed he had been ejected and ‘permanently banned’ from the hotel because he was “taking photos without permission”.
Everson argued that “the real reason … probably wasn’t the photos though”, with the journalist reporting on the DC building for five years.
In February, it was reported that room prices at the DC hotel had almost doubled, ranging between $1,331 (£969) and $2,266 (£1,650) per night for a booking on 3 and 4 March – dates which were significant to supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, who believed Trump would become president again on 4 March.
However, a week before and after 4 March, the rooms returned to $476 per night.
A few months later, The Washington Post said that a firm had been hired to sell the hotel, after it was put on sale in 2019 but pulled off the market due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Twitter users have since mocked the Trump hotel’s apparent lack of success, with some suggesting the images may be because the Republican is no longer in the White House:
Others, meanwhile, wondered if the seemingly empty rooms in the hotel could be used by Afghan refugees:
If he did, it would certainly be a rare occasion where Trump did something actually useful…