Trump is spending even more time playing golf (making money doing it) - GOLFING

Half of Trump’s first month in office saw him visiting Trump properties

On one-third of the first 31 days of his second term, Trump played golf.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/20/trump-second-term-golfing-resorts/


Perhaps the simplest way to explain Donald Trump’s second term as president is that it takes all of the patterns seen during his first administration and multiplies them by a factor of 10. Hostility to the separation of powers? Geopolitical isolationism? Embrace of autocrats? All of that — but more.

And, one month in, we’ve seen a lot of another pattern: visits to Trump Organization properties and a lot more golf.

By now it’s mundane to point out that Trump’s 2016 campaign emphasized how hard he was going to work. President Barack Obama was a slouch, Trump would suggest (unsubtly appealing to racial stereotypes) — someone who played 300 rounds of golf over his eight years in office, “more golf than many members on the PGA Tour.” Trump pledged to work hard: “I’m not going to have time to go play golf.”

He found the time. I tracked his golf habit during his first term, estimating that he played about 260 rounds over four years. He played golf for the first time within two weeks of being inaugurated in 2017, visiting his club in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Yet, by the standard of the first month of his second term, Trump’s 2017 absences from the White House were downright modest.

As of noon on Thursday, Trump will have been president for 31 full days. He will have spent all or part of 16 of those days at four Trump Organization properties. He will have played golf on 10 of those days. He will have spent 19 nights at the White House and 12 nights at properties owned by his private business. He will have spent precisely zero Friday or Saturday nights at the executive mansion. He will have played golf every weekend day except for this past Sunday, when he opted to take the presidential limousine for a spin at Daytona International Speedway instead.

By the same point in 2017, he’d spent all or part of 11 days at Trump properties and (likely) played golf only six times. That “likely” isn’t simply a hedge, mind you, but a reflection of a central problem with Trump’s excursions: Trump and his team generally block the media from observing what he’s doing at his properties. When he heads to a golf club, he usually plays, but it can be unclear whether he has and, if so, who joined his foursome.

That Trump’s trips involve his trading media accessibility for customer accessibility is the more important concern. Joe Biden would also often spend weekends at his home during his four years in office. But there were two big differences. First, Biden traveled to his private homes, not to active businesses at which he entertained — and solicited input from — paying customers. Second, traveling to a private home in Delaware is far less expensive than traveling to a sprawling estate in Florida that hosts private individuals and events.

It’s unclear exactly how much Trump’s first-term trips to Trump properties cost taxpayers — and, by extension, benefited Trump’s private company. A 2019 report determined that Trump’s first four trips to Mar-a-Lago in 2017 cost nearly $14 million. About half of that was just transit to and from the property. But stays at Mar-a-Lago (or his properties in Las Vegas or New Jersey or nearly anywhere else) also incurred on-the-ground costs like general security measures and rooms and expenses for Secret Service.

And that’s just the costs for Trump. Other Republicans, Republican organizations and members of the administration have also shown their fealty by staying or holding events at Trump properties. The president’s visit to his club in Doral, Florida, last month, for example, overlapped with a congressional Republican policy retreat. Earlier this month, he hosted Republican senators at Mar-a-Lago.

For Republican legislators, a weekend trip to Florida pays dividends beyond escaping winter weather: It potentially provides an audience with the president that is harder to come by in D.C. This is the benefit for private individuals, too. If you have business before the government, spending a few hundred thousand on a membership to Mar-a-Lago or a golf club is probably a much easier way to get Trump’s ear than working through lobbyists trying to set up a meeting back in the capital.

Trump’s allies and apologists will note that the president’s office functionally travels with the president, that he can make decisions as readily at his clubs as he can in the Oval Office. And there’s some truth to that. But conducting business in the Oval Office holds obvious advantages that conducting it during Mar-a-Lago dinner service lacks.

One of those advantages is that it doesn’t cost anything for Trump to walk downstairs from the White House residence to sit at his Oval Office desk. I would hate for Elon Musk to realize that keeping Trump in D.C. would save the government far more money than canceling various magazine subscriptions.