How Much Money Jas Been Spent On Trumps Golfing Weekends So Far
Donald Trump's golf habit has already cost taxpayers at to the lowest degree $102 million in extra travel and security expenses, and adjacent month volition achieve a new milestone: a vii-effigy presidential visit to some other country so he can play at his own form.
U.S. taxpayers have spent $81 one thousand thousand for the president's ii dozen trips to Florida, according to a HuffPost assay. They spent $17 million for his fifteen trips to New Jersey, another $1 million so he could visit his resort in Los Angeles and at least $3 million for his two days in Scotland last summertime ― $ane.three million of which went only for rental cars for the massive entourage that accompanies a president abroad.
And, yet Trump'southward entrada promise that if elected he would not play golf at all, the White House has done preliminary work for Trump'due south visit to his resort on the due west coast of Ireland next month, co-ordinate to Irish media and government sources, fifty-fifty though no official meeting with Irish leaders is planned in the capital, Dublin.
Andrew Milligan - PA Images via Getty Images
Late Tuesday afternoon, the White Firm announced that Trump would meet with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in Shannon, just 30 miles past air from Trump's golf resort in Doonbeg. It volition be the outset time Trump volition visit a foreign country — with the staggering footprint of personnel and equipment that entails — for the chief purpose of playing golf, though an official purpose was layered on after the fact.
"It'south apparently an incredible waste product of money," said Robert Weissman, president of the grouping Public Citizen. He and then quipped: "Of class, the more than time he spends golfing, the less time he spends governing, the meliorate."
The $102 million total to engagement spent on Trump's presidential golfing represents 255 times the annual presidential salary he volunteered non to take. It is more than than three times the cost of special counsel Robert Mueller'southward investigation that Trump continually complains nigh. It would fund for six years the Special Olympics programme that Trump's proposed budget had originally cut to save money.
While Republicans and Trump himself frequently criticized former President Barack Obama for his golf outings, Trump has spent more than twice equally many days on the links, to date, as Obama did at the same signal in his first term. And because Trump has insisted on dozens of trips to New Jersey and Florida to play at his resorts there, taxpayers are spending more than three times equally much as they did for golf by the aforementioned point in Obama'due south term.
The White House did not respond to numerous queries regarding this story. North Carolina Republican congressman Mark Meadows, a close Trump ally, dismissed the $102 million effigy as insignificant.
"At that place'south a lot more of import things to worry almost than the rounding errors that nosotros sometimes have on these things," he said Tuesday.
Just equally troubling equally the amount Trump has spent so far on golf trips is the fact that his visits have been to his ain properties — for-profit businesses that put money in his own pocket and that Trump routinely praises during his visits.
During his trip to Scotland terminal twelvemonth, for instance, Trump wrote: "I have arrived in Scotland and will be at Trump Turnberry for ii days of meetings, calls and hopefully, some golf - my primary form of do! The atmospheric condition is beautiful, and this identify is incredible!"
"His superlative priority with these trips is not the business of the American people, it'due south the business of the Trump System," said Jordan Libowitz of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "The American presidency has become another tool to annunciate his golf game properties."
"I merely want to stay in the White House and work my donkey off."
- Candidate Donald Trump in 2016
The vast bulk of Trump'southward golf costs upshot from his insistence on playing at his Florida courses in West Palm Beach and Jupiter, where he has spent 61 days while staying at his resort in the nearby town of Palm Embankment. A weekend trip to Mar-a-Lago averages $iii.4 million, with most of that resulting from the hundreds of thousands of dollars information technology costs each hour to wing both the modified Boeing 747 that serves equally the principal Air Strength One, also as the C-17 cargo planes required to move all the support vehicles in Trump's motorcade.
Determining the cost of Trump's golf visits is not easy. The White House is non subject field to the Freedom of Information Act, and Trump's press part does not answer most questions nigh his golf visits — even refusing to confirm whether he is, in fact, playing golf when he is physically at his golf game courses.
Just a recent Regime Accountability Office report regarding Trump'southward four early 2017 visits to Mar-a-Lago has provided hard data and a methodology that HuffPost followed in its own analysis.
The HuffPost analysis took a bourgeois approach to determining costs. For instance, it used a per-hr charge per unit of $xv,994 for Trump'southward use of the smaller Air Forcefulness I that he takes to Bedminster, New Jersey, even though that figure accounts but for fuel and maintenance, not the additional factors that GAO used when it determined the $273,000-per-hour cost of operating the larger airplane.
Ivylise Simones/HuffPost
Any presidential outing requires coordination of multiple offices and agencies and incurs boosted costs compared to staying in the White Firm. Even one of Trump'due south twenty-four hours trips to his class beyond the Potomac River in northern Virginia — at that place have been 52 to engagement — requires fuel for all the motorcade vehicles and some personnel costs if overtime is necessary for Surreptitious Service agents and others. (Those expenses, however, are minimal compared to flight costs, and HuffPost did not include them in its $102 million total.)
And the price increases exponentially the farther Trump travels.
Flight the Marine Corps helicopters — three of them are used each time ― from the White House to Articulation Base Andrews in Maryland, where Air Force I is based, costs $57,000 for the circular trip, according to the GAO report. Flight the massive C-17 transports loaded with Trump's seven-ton armored limousines and other specialized support vehicles costs $800,500 per Mar-a-Lago trip.
And for each of those trips, the Coast Guard winds up spending an extra $855,500 to patrol the Atlantic Ocean to the east of Mar-a-Lago and the Intracoastal Waterway to the west. That figure includes the expense of getting necessary ships, boats and crews to Southward Florida from stations every bit far abroad as Boston and Houston, the GAO reported.
When Trump travels overseas, the costs rise fifty-fifty college, as nonetheless more than agencies get involved. Dozens of White House staff members may travel with Trump during a weekend to Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster, only that number swells to several hundred on an overseas trip. The administration avoids lengthy motorcades on foreign soil, so Marine helicopters and V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft must exist pre-positioned. A fill-in Air Force One is sent along equally the back up airplane.
Co-ordinate to a Scottish paper last summer, the U.Due south. State Department paid a local car rental agency $1.2 million for vehicles for all the staff who relocated from London, where Trump had met with Queen Elizabeth 2 and Prime number Minister Theresa May, to Scotland, where Trump wanted to play golf at his Turnberry resort before heading to Republic of finland to meet Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
Between that expense and the costs of moving equipment from London to Glasgow and so 55 miles southwest to Turnberry, those two golf days toll taxpayers at least $3 one thousand thousand beyond what they would have spent if Trump had simply stayed in London, according to HuffPost'due south analysis.
Leon Neal via Getty Images
One of Trump's favorite lines of attack against Obama was to point out his frequent golf outings during his presidency.
"I play golf to relax. My visitor is in slap-up shape. @BarackObama plays golf to escape work while America goes down the drain," Trump tweeted in December 2011.
"Can you lot believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the solar day playing golf. Worse than Carter," he wrote three years later.
As he began his own run for the White House, candidate Trump repeatedly promised that golf would never brand it onto a President Trump schedule. "I love golf, only if I were in the White House, I don't call back I'd e'er see Turnberry again. I don't think I'd ever run across Doral again," he told a rally audience in February 2016, referring to his class near the Miami drome. "I don't ever think I'd see anything. I merely want to stay in the White Firm and work my ass off."
Trump reneged on that pledge within 2 weeks, when he took his first of 24 trips to date to Mar-a-Lago. He has, according to HuffPost's analysis, spent a total of 61 days on his Florida courses, 58 at Bedminster in New Jersey, one at Trump National Golf game Order in Los Angeles and two at Trump Turnberry.
Wed is the 853rd day of his presidency, and Trump has spent 174 of them at one of his own golf game courses. He spent ane additional day golfing: Nov. 5, 2017, at the Kasumigaseki Country Guild outside Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Information technology is the only fourth dimension thus far that he has played golf at a class he does non own.
That insistence of frequenting his own properties, in fact, has driven his total golf expenses disproportionately higher than Obama'due south at the same point in his presidency.
By Obama's 853rd day in office, he had spent seventy days at a golf game class. But 48 of those golf days were at courses on military bases: Joint Base Andrews or Fort Belvoir, both in suburban Washington a short motorcade ride from the White House. All just 2 of the others were on family vacations to Hawaii and Martha'southward Vineyard.
And although Hawaii is four times as far from Washington, D.C., equally Palm Embankment, Obama merely went at that place twice in his get-go 28 months. In that aforementioned time bridge, Trump has gone to Mar-a-Lago 24 times. While Obama made ii trips to Martha'south Vineyard through May of 2011, Trump has already gone to Bedminster 15 times.
The result: Obama racked up out-of-town golf expenses of approximately $30 one thousand thousand compared to Trump's $102 meg.
And Trump'southward tab volition grow by several million dollars more if he follows through with a golf outing at his resort at Doonbeg, Republic of ireland, before or afterward his coming trip to London and Normandy in early June. An Ireland stop ways travel on Air Forcefulness 1, C-17s to ferry vehicles and helicopters equally well as hundreds of White House, Pentagon and Country Department staff that brand upward the entourage of a foreign visit.
Cognizant of how a foreign visit solely for a golf vacation might wait, the White House tried to arrange some type of official meeting with Irish leaders for weeks after it began planning the Doonbeg trip.
But Prime Government minister Leo Varadkar'south government, cognizant of Trump's deep unpopularity in Ireland, was reluctant to agree to the White House request that Varadkar travel to Trump'due south private resort on the opposite side of the land from Dublin, said an Irish authorities source who spoke on condition of anonymity. Tuesday'southward announcement of a meeting in Shannon, peradventure at Shannon airport — where Air Force I will state — appears to be the compromise location.
"Nosotros welcome the announcement of the visit past the U.Due south. president," the Irish gaelic Embassy said in a statement Tuesday. "Detailed arrangements effectually the visit volition be made public in due form."
"Only as troubling as the amount Trump has spent so far on golf game trips is the fact that his visits have been to his own backdrop — for-profit businesses that put money in his own pocket."
The White House press staff, meanwhile, did not respond to repeated queries nigh various aspects of this study over a menstruum of weeks.
It is the same strategy that Trump has used throughout his ii and a half years in office when information technology comes to his golfing. While the Bill Clinton, George Due west. Bush and Obama White Houses usually released the names of the president's golf partners later on any given outing, the Trump White House has almost always refused to ostend that Trump even golfed — including on occasions when he has shown up wearing a golf shirt, trousers and ball cap. (The but exceptions have been when Trump has played with a famous person or a member of Congress.)
On March 3, 2018, HuffPost filed a White House pool report from Mar-a-Lago stating: "Puddle did ask the White House what the president was doing at his golf course and with whom he was doing it but received no reply."
This by Sunday, four hours afterward arriving at Trump's golf form in Sterling, Virginia, the Washington Blade reporter serving equally pool wrote: "No word from the White House on POTUS' golf game partners, nor even confirmation POTUS was, in fact, golfing."
On some golf days, Trump or his White House take claimed — dubiously — that he is involved in "meetings," when, in fact, social media posts later show he had been out on the class.
Meanwhile, Trump's Republican supporters who, like Trump, spent years attacking Obama for his golf game outings have suddenly gone silent.
During Obama'southward second term, Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso asked the GAO to look at a trip he took that combined a speech in Illinois with a golf weekend in Palm Beach. When the GAO released a written report in 2016, Barrasso said in a statement: "President Obama had such little disregard for the taxpayer that he spent millions of dollars to play golf with Tiger Woods. This arrogance is par for the grade for the Obama administration."
Asked near Trump's far higher golf spending, Barrasso told HuffPost Tuesday: "I haven't followed that at all."
Ivylise Simones/HuffPost
Michael Steel, once a top aide to one-time Republican House Speaker John Boehner, acknowledged that Republicans' views on presidential golf may non exist consistent in contempo years. "There's no question that people'south concerns and criticisms often come with a partisan lens," he said. "At the aforementioned fourth dimension, I don't think anyone prefers the president be watching television and tweeting than playing golf game ... I think it's healthy for people to relax."
More troubling to watchdog groups than Trump's hypocrisy, though, is the self-dealing that occurs whenever Trump travels to his own resorts. On peak of the publicity value of a presidential visit, each trip also results in many thousands of taxpayer dollars flowing to Trump resorts for hotel rooms, golf carts and nutrient and drink for Surreptitious Service agents.
Considering Trump continues to profit from these businesses — despite a promise he made during the entrada that he would non — a portion of that taxpayer money ends up in Trump'south own pocket. The GAO report found that Mar-a-Lago received approximately $60,000 in but the four visits information technology studied.
"As Trump promotes his golf game courses through taxpayer-financed visits to his clubs, it'south an extra benefit for him that his properties are able to scoop up some taxpayer money directly," said Public Denizen's Weissman.
"It'due south articulate that to Donald Trump, the presidency is merely another way to do good his businesses," CREW'south Libowitz added. "Because of his refusal to divest from his business empire, Americans must always inquire whether his decisions are fabricated primarily with his bank account in heed."
Igor Bobic and Arthur Delaney contributed reporting.
Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-golf-102-million-taxpayers_n_5ce46727e4b09b23e65a01bb
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