Donald Trump didn’t go to Florida over the weekend. But although he wasn’t hyping Mar-a-Lago and his two nearby golf courses, the Trump properties still got a lot of free advertising for yet another weekend. Trump went to his Virginia golf club on both Saturday and Sunday and had dinner at his Washington, D.C., hotel on Saturday night.
Saturday’s stops marked the eighth weekend in a row — out of the 10 weekends he has been in office — that Mr. Trump has visited a Trump-branded property, including his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. [...]
Mr. Trump has now made three visits to the Trump National Golf Club, a string of trips that started after Eric Trump came to Washington this month to promote the 2017 Senior P.G.A. Championship tournament. It is being held at the Virginia golf course on Memorial Day weekend.
Tickets to the event are being sold as Mr. Trump is pushing the golf course into the spotlight, with reporters and photographers in tow on Saturday for a daylong visit.
No, really. The presidency is being used to sell tickets to a golf tournament.
The White House says Trump went to the Virginia golf club for meetings (apparently the White House isn’t good enough for holding meetings) and wouldn’t confirm he golfed, but social media pictures suggested that—bombshell, here—he probably did.
Saturday night he went to dinner at the one restaurant he was able to entice into his D.C. hotel, where “a reporter from The Times was already having dinner”—and what do you want to bet other news organizations have also learned that if you want to be able to report on what Trump does on any given weekend evening he isn’t in Florida, you book a table in his hotel?—and where he was greeted by a built-in friendly audience, because people who are willing to stay or eat at a Trump property are people who are going to be excited to see the man in person.
An ego boost plus personal profit? That’s everything Donald Trump wants from life, and the presidency delivers it up to him every time he visits one of his properties. The usual concerns of the office, like the Constitution, the responsible governance of the nation, and the welfare of the American people can go hang.