JFlorio wrote:
He did not go to his resorts every weekend.
From an Aug. 27, 2020 article:
"President Trump has visited or stayed at one or more of his properties on 394 separate days since becoming president. That figure amounts to almost one third of his time in office at one of his properties, or well over a year of his presidency."
https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/trump-500-visits-trump-properties/And another, from the day he left the WH for good. With a chart of which days were spent where over the four years he was in office:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/20/trumps-presidency-ends-where-so-much-it-was-spent-trump-organization-propertyTrump’s presidency ends where so much of it was spent: A Trump Organization property
Analysis by Philip Bump
National columnist
January 20, 2021
Were he elected, Trump promised, he’d be “working for you,” as he said that August. “I’m not going to have time to go play golf.”
It took two weeks for President Trump to find the time.
...
There were two periods where he made relatively few trips to his properties. The first was when the government was partially shut down at the end of 2018 after Trump demanded Congress appropriate money to build a wall on the border with Mexico. The other was at the start of the coronavirus pandemic... a lull that ended when a leading government official on the pandemic task force explicitly stated it was once again okay to play golf.
Here are Trump’s visits to his properties by the numbers:
Trump has visited a Trump Organization property on 428 days of his presidency, or one visit every 3.4 days. That means that he has visited on about two days of every week of his presidency.
Normally, those two days are weekend days. It was common for him to head to his golf club in Sterling, Va., on warmer weekends when he was in Washington. He visited that club on 106 days, probably playing golf on 103 of them. It was the property to which he paid the most visits.
He was president for 418 weekend days. He visited one of his properties on 240 of those days, or on 57 percent of them.
Trump probably played 261 rounds of golf as president. This is just an estimate because, unlike Obama, his team often wouldn’t report whether he was playing golf at his properties. If accurate, though, that’s a round every 5.6 days. By contrast, Obama played 333 rounds of golf — over twice as many years. That’s about once every 8.8 days.
Trump spent the most time at Mar-a-Lago. He was there for all or part of 142 days of his presidency over 32 visits. He was at his private club in Bedminster, N.J., on 106 days, the same number as the visits he paid to Sterling.
The course where Trump played the second-most rounds was Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., a short drive from Mar-a-Lago. He played there an estimated 87 times.
As president, he visited 14 Trump properties in seven states, the District of Columbia and three countries, including Scotland and Ireland. He only played two rounds of golf that weren’t at Trump properties; both were in the company of then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Japan.
The amount of government money spent shuttling Trump to his properties and then spent at the properties remains a bit murky. We know that Trump’s first four trips to Mar-a-Lago cost about $14 million, mostly in the costs of operating the aircraft necessary for the trip. If we assume that each trip to the resort costs about $3.4 million, that’s $109 million just for the Mar-a-Lago trips alone.
Not all of that money goes to Trump, of course. The Washington Post reported in October that the government had been billed about $2.5 million by Trump properties since he had taken office.
Interestingly, Trump only visited the Trump hotel in Washington about two dozen times, despite its proximity to the White House. He returned to Trump Tower in New York only eight times.