Donald Trump is headed to his Bedminster golf club for 17 days, and let’s all give some side-eye to the Associated Press headline writer who rather dubiously wrote “Trump set to embark on 1st vacation since inauguration.” Because the article given that headline specifies that:
So far, he has spent 13 of his 28 weekends in office away from the White House, mostly at his properties in Palm Beach, Florida, or in Bedminster, New Jersey, according to an Associated Press count. The figures include a weekend during official travel overseas, and Father’s Day weekend at Camp David, the government-owned presidential retreat in Maryland.
As of July 30, Trump had been in office for 195 days, of which he’d spent time at one of his own properties on 58 days and on a golf property on 43 days, according to an NCB News tracker. Presidents deserve time off, but there’s time off and then there’s jetting off to a golf club almost every other weekend. Especially after constantly harping on how your predecessor played too much golf. And promising that he would be different:
Trump said last year that he wouldn’t have time for golf if he became president. “I’m going to be working for you, I’m not going to have time to go play golf,” he told supporters in Virginia. But he plays golf whenever he’s at his clubs; sometimes it’s the full 18 holes, other times less than that. His staff rarely acknowledges that he plays, even when photos of him on the course pop up on social media.
But that’s Trump: new levels of BS all the time. More than golf, though, what Trump seems to get out of all his visits to Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster is the chance to schmooze with his fellow rich people, the ones who’ve shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to join his clubs. He gets to be king of the manor in a way he can’t be at the White House, where things are occasionally expected of him and he even sometimes has to pay attention in meetings. And this is just what America needs: A Donald Trump recharged with the sense that he’s the absolute center of the universe.