T-Mobile CEO John Legere might have publicly bashed Trump Hotels in the past, but the telecom mogul appears to have changed his tune while waiting for the president to approve his company’s pending $26 billion merger with Sprint.
According to documents and eyewitness accounts obtained by the Washington Post, nine high ranking T-Mobile executives—including its chief technology officer, chief strategy officer, chief financial officer, chief operating officer, and Legere himself—checked into Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., as “VIP Arrivals.”
Journalist Zach Everson tweeted that Legere spent so much time at the hotel in May, the month after T-Mobile announced its plans for a merger, that he turned the many photos documenting Legere’s stays into a collage.
So many pics of T-Mobile CEO John Legere at the Trump Hotel DC last May that I made a collage at the time. https://t.co/OdEfymxkLd pic.twitter.com/BNeCRgyRPJ
— Zach Everson (@Z_Everson) January 16, 2019
The Post reports that the T-Mobile execs stayed at Trump’s D.C. hotel for at least 38 nights in 2018, although the number could be higher due to incomplete data.
“It’s become a place I feel very comfortable,” Legere told the Post, noting that he expected no special treatment for staying in the hotel it was situated in a very “convenient” location for meetings.
But Legere publicly tweeted very different sentiments about the hotels in 2015.
After Trump bashed T-Mobile’s “terrible” service, Legere, who was staying at a Trump hotel in New York at the time, responded in a stream of now-deleted tweets that not only would he “obviously leave [Trump’s] hotel right away” but tweeted the next day that he was “so happy to wake up in a hotel where every single item isn’t labeled ‘Trump’ and all the books and TV is about him.”
John Legere, the CEO of T-Mobile, used to mock Trump hotels. Now he spends lots of money there as he tries to convince the Trump admin to approve his merger with Sprint. https://t.co/p3lbLoGcdk
— Steven Ginsberg (@stevenjay) January 16, 2019
Although Eric Trump, who heads the Trump real estate business while his father is in office, told the Post that the hotel plays “absolutely no role in politics,” the property has come under scrutiny for housing foreign governments and lobbyists trying to curry favor with the president.
Trump is currently facing two lawsuits alleging his hotel has hurt local businesses (since foreign governments now spend at Trump properties) and how profits from foreign governments at his properties might violate the foreign emoluments clause.