Were he to reach the White House, Trump said, he wouldn’t make the same mistake for which he’d been lambasting Obama since 2011. “I'm going to be working for you,” he told supporters in August 2016. “I'm not going to have time to go play golf.”
55 million tax payer's money for golf during the first 6 months:
Now that he’s president, Trump frequently departs the White House and spends the weekend golfing at either his South Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, or his country club in the New Jersey suburb of Bedminster. The promise he’d made a year before was discarded so quickly, you have to wonder if he even remembers making it. Politico did the legwork: George W. Bush didn’t golf for the first five months of his presidency, while Obama stayed away from his beloved links for four months following his inauguration. Trump held out for all of two weeks. He has visited a golf club 40 times since taking office in January, according to the self-explanatory site Trump Golf Count, which estimates the forays have cost American taxpayers $55 million.
“This is the laziest, most ignorant president in history,” says MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell.
There was the $1 trillion infrastructure plan, for example. What happened to that? For the love of Lincoln, someone tell him to forget tax cuts and Muslim bans. He should be out there paving I-95, slapping fresh paint on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.Instead, he is playing golf and tweeting anti-CNN wrestling memes.
Two days before the presidential inauguration, Trump tweeted a picture of himself seated at a desk, pen hovering above a stack of papers. On his face was the faraway look of a great man lost in deep thought: Pericles pondering the Athenian dead, Churchill surveying a blitzkrieged London. The accompanying text revealed that the president-elect was composing his inaugural address at the Mar-a-Lago resort, which he’d already rebranded “the Winter White House.”The tweet was supposed to show leadership at work, but it instead revealed the lengths to which Trump will go to foster the image of diligent leadership. It didn’t take a team of CIA digital forensicists to figure out that the Spanish tile wall behind Trump in the photograph matched the one in the reception area at Mar-a-Lago. A photograph soon surfaced of a young woman at the very same desk, looking like she was ready to confirm your dinner reservation. Further scrutiny—that is, clicking a magnifying glass icon to zoom in—revealed that the papers on the desk were seemingly blank, while the writing instrument in Trump’s hand appeared to be a Sharpie, not especially useful for writing out a lengthy speech. Wanting to look like a head of state, Trump instead ended up looking like a concierge-in-training.
In April, Elaine Godfrey of The Atlantic used news reports about Trump’s well-chronicled habits to calculate that he watches about five hours of television daily.He seems to trust Fox & Friends more than the members of the intelligence community who brief him each morning. He certainly finds the former more compelling. “He gets bored and likes to watch TV,” as Politico summarized the insight of one White House insider.
in late April, the president confessed that he was both overwhelmed and frustrated. “I loved my previous life,” he said. “I had so many things going. This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.” That may be the most remarkable admission ever made by a sitting American president. Clinton’s infidelities, Nixon’s paranoia: Those were the usual failings of the powerful. But a disdain for power because wielding power is harder than pretending to wield power in a reality television series?
“Nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” Trump said in February.
“His idea of work is a Hollywood idea of work,” says D’Antonio, author of the biography The Truth About Trump. “He ‘works’ in the way a king would work.”
In a May interview with Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, Trump biographer Timothy O’Brien explained that after the erection of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan in 1983, “he never cared again,” so impressed was he with that monolithic monument to his ego. “He’s fundamentally lazy,” O’Brien told Dowd. “He free-rides so many processes he doesn’t know anything about. He used to do it in the business world, and now he does it in the political world.”
Trump’s foray into politics would have been impossible without The Apprentice, which introduced him to Middle America, the onetime King of Debt reborn as a capable chief executive both ruthless and uncannily perceptive. But that was also an illusion, as we were recently reminded by Clay Aiken, the singer and onetime Celebrity Apprentice contestant. On a podcast last month, Aiken revealed that Trump wielded the show’s famous slogan—“You’re fired!”—at the instruction of others. The great leader of men was, at least in Aiken’s telling, a puppet. “The show’s producers from NBC made those calls,” explained a report in The Washington Post, “giving Trump instructions through a teleprompter on his desk that looked like a phone.”
Trump’s activities are hard to pin down because his daily schedule includes “downtime,” for which the White House does not provide detailed descriptions.
And don't forget Pence: " When Trump hit the six-month mark of his presidency, Mike Pence, his unfailingly loyal vice president, marked the occasion with an op-ed for Fox News. Doing his best Soviet apparatchik imitation, Pence wrote that “President Trump’s accomplishments are nothing short of historic.”
Trump has held several campaign-style rallies since becoming president. He is good at these, and he enjoys them, as do his most ardent supporters.
Obama took office during the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent and rising. Eight years later, as he prepared to leave the White House, it was 4.7 percent, a nine-year low. And yet Trump cites “absolutely tremendous economic progress,” as if he were the one who pulled the nation out of the foreclosure crisis.
He brags about having quelled the flow of immigrants entering the United States illegally, but it was under Obama that illegal immigration fell to a 44-year nadir. Trump has, however, managed to keep out tourists. America has become so great, international travelers aren’t coming like they used to.
There have been clues. Mark Leibovich, a politics reporter for the The New York Times Magazine, recently paid a visit to the White House and was, to his great surprise, led into “a small dining room just off the Oval Office” to meet the president. It was a weekday afternoon. Trump was alone, watching a recorded episode of Fox & Friends.
When he was king, he was the King of Debt, and he may still owe as much as $1.8 billion to creditors. His casinos closed. His airline went bust. But even as he accrued failures, lawsuits and debts, Trump managed to turn “Trump” into a synonym for success. The letters were made of plastic, but they were dipped in gold.
