Donald Trump’s second term is in full swing—pun intended. And so too are criticisms of the amount of time, and certainly the amount of money, he spends golfing
Dunking on the President for making par (or failing to) is a common trope in American political discourse: Bush on the course in Texas, Obama in Hawaii, Trump at any number of his own properties and Biden in, well, early retirement. Fun as it is, though, this national pastime nonetheless disregards a few important points—and it’s probably past time (get it?) we all dispensed with it, unless we’re talking about weekly White House jaunts to a course in St. Barts.
One of the critics’ most-common ”gotcha” lines is how expensive a day on the links is when you’re the Commander in Chief. But a lot of the costs associated with golf (or other “vacations” or “weekends off”) are typically to do with security provided at a President’s home base—even if that base is his own hotel. In other words, it’s not just about tee-time.
As Snopes pointed out in fact-checking a recent Huffington Post piece that claimed Trump’s golf trips have cost U.S. taxpayers more than $26 million in his second term alone: “Trump’s trips to Mar-a-Lago mobilize extensive resources for his protection, from boats guarding the coast of the island where Mar-a-Lago is located, to lodging for his team and the members of his security detail.”
As Snopes also noted (and as defenders of every President name-checked on the above list have shouted from the rooftops), Trump does in fact work while he’s away: signing executive orders and conducting press conferences, though he’s also careful to block off time to pick fights on social media. Being President is a full-time job, after all, granted that the optics of doing the job from a golf cart in a luxurious locale may not be great if the country is in the middle of an economic crisis.
And really, don’t critics of the President want him spending less time governing and more time doing… whatever? Truly, do progressives want Trump hunched over a desk with Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, cooking up new plans for more mass deportations? Do they really want him spending more time actively bullying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky? We all now know that Biden was pretty much away with the fairies for a good chunk of his time in the White House, but surely Republicans would have been grateful if Obama had, in fact, spent more time on the golf course—or eating snow cones in Waikiki—and less time pushing onerous regulation and terrible, lefty legislation.
Candidly, if you dislike a President’s agenda, the best possible thing would likely be for that President to spend his entire administration in the sand traps, asleep in a beach chair or clearing trees back at the ranch.
Let’s also remember, being President is one of the most stressful jobs in the world. (I won’t say the most stressful—that title might go to whoever has to deliver truly bad news to Kim Jong Un or perhaps runs air traffic control in the vicinity of D.C.’s Reagan Airport.) Much as we may hate the guy in office, they literally decide whether or not to fire off nukes. Isn’t it best if their stress levels are kept to a minimum? Rest, relaxation and doing something other than sitting behind the Resolute desk is actually important to prevent as much bad presidential decision-making as possible—or at least bad presidential decision-making by sheer error.
As there is in every presidency, there will be plenty to complain about Trump’s White House operations. But the truth is, over the next four years, as during the previous four, the previous before that and so on, there are going to be plenty of bigger scandals to dig into. We should count ourselves lucky if a “crazy golf” story even makes it into the top hundred by the time we get to January 2029.
