There’s an easy cut out there for Elon Musk’s DOGE squad, but somehow, his team has missed nearly $11 million President Donald Trump spent on golf trips.
Trump has taken a golf trip each of the four weekends since returning to the presidency on Jan. 20, and he has now played golf at his own properties on nine of his first 30 days in office, Huffington Post reports.
The $10.7 million tally is based on a 2019 report by the Government Accountability Office breaking down the costs of Trump’s trips to Mar-a-Lago during his first term. The figure is likely higher, as HuffPo’s math was based on 2017 dollars.
The GAO calculated a total cost of $3,383,250 for each trip. About one-third of that was the flight cost of Air Force One for the round trip, with additional expenses for flying down vehicles, including two presidential limousines, for Trump’s motorcade and reimbursing the Coast Guard for stationing a gunship in the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast and heavily armed boats in the Intracoastal Waterway.
“It’s clear that when the Trump administration considers the definition of corruption and wasteful spending, it doesn’t count spending that ends up in the president’s pockets,” said Jordan Libowitz of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “By visiting his for-profit businesses roughly a third of his days in office, Trump is directing government spending to follow him there and profiting off the trip.”
Trump is not only golfing on the government’s dime but also using that time to promote the golf courses he owns.
Thus far in his second term, Trump has played golf at his own resorts each of the four weekends he has been in office. Three of the four have been at his course in West Palm Beach during his Mar-a-Lago visits, although the golf-related total for one of the trips is reduced by about $546,000 because the trip included a leg to New Orleans to watch the Super Bowl.
The total for the first trip to Doral is also less than a pure golf vacation would have cost because it included a segment out to Los Angeles and Las Vegas on official White House business. HuffPost is not counting those flight costs toward his golf total.
“Elon? Please explain,” wrote one critic on X. “Waste fraud and abuse!” another critic wrote.
DOGE officials wouldn’t comment on why presidential spending is not on their radar.
This $10.7 million, by the way, is on top of the $151.5 million he spent golfing in his first term,” HuffPo White House correspondent S.V. Date posted on X.
A Trump Golf Track has gone viral. Using public information reveals that the president spent seven of his first 29 days in office golfing, accounting for 24.14% of his presidency.
During his initial presidential term, the tracker claims the president visited a “Trump Organization property on 428 of the 1,461 days of his first presidential term”, about one-third of his first term.
The president was a frequent critic of Joe Biden’s weekend beach trips to Delaware, but the former president traveled on Marine 1, with the helicopter trip costing about $150,000. When he used the smaller Air Force One, a modified Boeing 757, the trip expenses totaled about $500,000, according to HuffPo.
But the MAGA nation was unmoved by the report.
“Man saves country 3trillion dollars. Gets slammed for costing country a few million. Previous President stole more than that every day,” one Trump supporter posted on X.
Another commenter rationalized, “Don’t care. He gets more done than any other President we’ve ever seen.”
