Let us begin with the buildings.
There are three of them, and he owns all three.
The first is in Palm Beach, Florida. The second is in Bedminster, New Jersey. The third is a golf club outside Washington. There is a fourth, in Manhattan, which he visits less often now, and a fifth in Scotland, which we will come to, and which is the funniest item in this entire file.
That is the itinerary. That is the whole thing. The President of the United States has at his disposal a customized wide-body aircraft, a helicopter, a fleet of motor vehicles, the diplomatic apparatus of the world’s largest economy, and a standing invitation to essentially every location on the surface of the planet, and he uses this equipment to go to buildings he already owns, on a rotation determined by the weather.
The migration
This is not a figure of speech. The pattern has been tracked and it is seasonal.
From November through April he is in the Palm Beach area, at Mar-a-Lago and at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. From May through September he is at Bedminster in New Jersey. The trackers that follow the presidential schedule have documented this cycle across both terms and it holds with the reliability of something you would expect to see in a nature documentary, narrated in a hushed voice over footage of birds who at least have the decency to cover four thousand miles.
He has now visited Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach forty-nine times as president. Forty-nine. That is not travel. That is a commute, undertaken with a motorcade.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington counted 259 separate visits to his own properties in the first 512 days of this term, 148 of them to golf courses. He spent all or part of 191 of those days on property he personally owns, which is thirty-seven percent. Mar-a-Lago alone accounts for 102 trips.
One tracker puts him at a Trump golf property on 152 of the first 569 days, or 26.7 percent. For comparison, Obama golfed on 11.4 percent of his days in office, George W. Bush on 0.8 percent, and Biden on 1.4 percent.
The point is not the golf, which is a hobby and to which he is entitled. The point is that a man with the entire world available has selected, from among all possible destinations, the same three buildings, over and over, for a decade, and the only variable in the selection is the ambient temperature.
The bill
Because he cannot go anywhere alone, this arrangement generates a cost, and the cost has been estimated at $116 million for the second term to date, or roughly $765,000 for every day he spends on the road.
That figure is an extrapolation, and it is an extrapolation because the government has itemized the actual expense of these trips exactly once. In 2019 the Government Accountability Office audited four trips to Mar-a-Lago and found they had cost $13.6 million, which works out to $3.4 million per weekend, to move a man to a building he owns in order to be in it.
There has been no second audit. Every number since is an estimate built on that one audit, which means the only firm accounting we possess of what this habit costs is now seven years old and covers four weekends.
The world, such as he has seen it
Now the foreign travel, which is where the inventory becomes genuinely strange.
In his first eighteen months in office he made twenty-one visits to other countries, against twenty-eight for Obama and twenty-three for Bush over the identical period. That is a shortfall but not a scandal.
The composition is the scandal. Of those twenty-one trips, exactly one was in North America. He had not been to Mexico, which shares a two-thousand-mile border with the country he was running and which was the subject of approximately forty percent of everything he said out loud during that period. He had a great deal to say about Mexico. He had not been there.
He has visited Germany once, for a summit in Hamburg in 2017. There has been no bilateral visit to the largest economy in Europe and one of the closest allies the United States has, which is not a small omission, and which has simply never been explained.
The two trips that officially did not happen
Here is my favorite thing about this man’s relationship with geography.
In June 2019 he walked across the demarcation line at the Korean Demilitarized Zone and stood on North Korean soil for approximately one minute, becoming the first sitting American president ever to enter that country. It was genuinely unprecedented. It had never been done. Whatever else you think of it, it was a thing that had not previously occurred in the history of the republic.
The State Department’s Office of the Historian, which maintains the official record of presidential foreign travel, declined to count it.
In 2018 he stopped at Ramstein Air Base in southwest Germany. That is also not counted as a visit to German territory.
So the two most unusual journeys of his presidency are both, in the official record maintained by his own government, journeys he did not take. He is a man who has been to North Korea and has not been to North Korea. He went somewhere no president had gone, for one minute, and the archive quietly declined to write it down, which is either a technicality or the single most eloquent piece of bureaucratic criticism ever produced.
Scotland
In this term he took a five-day trip to Scotland, at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of ten million dollars.
He went to his own golf courses.
Consider the achievement. He crossed an ocean. He deployed the aircraft, the security detail, the advance teams, the local police overtime, the entire logistical tail of a presidential foreign visit, and he arrived at property he owns, in order to be on it. Even the intercontinental travel is a commute. Given a whole different landmass, a different climate, a different culture, a country with distilleries and castles and the actual Highlands, he located the parcel of it that was legally his and went and stood on that.
There is no version of this that is not funny and there is no version that is not also a little bit sad, in the way of a very rich child who has been to Paris and can tell you about the hotel.
The combat zone
He did not visit American troops in a combat zone for nearly two years.
His two predecessors both went early. Bush was in Iraq about eight months into that war. Obama went to Iraq a few months into his first term. It is a fixture of the office and it goes back to the Second World War, because the person who orders people into harm’s way is expected to look at them at least once.
Asked about it in October 2018, he said he did not think it was overly necessary, and that he had been very busy with everything taking place here, and that he was doing a lot of things, and that he was doing a lot of things.
A White House official gave the Washington Post a different explanation, on background, which was that he has never been interested in going, that he is afraid of those situations, and that he is afraid people want to kill him.
He eventually went, to Al Asad in Iraq, on Christmas night 2018, after two years of questions.
And in November of that year, while in France, he declined to attend a ceremony at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, where 2,289 American war dead are buried, on the grounds that it was raining.
The men in that cemetery have been rained on continuously since 1918.
The catering truck
Which brings us to July of this year, and to the most complete expression of the entire tendency.
After the NATO summit in Ankara, the President of the United States walked up the stairs of Air Force One in front of the cameras, boarded, and was then removed from the aircraft inside a catering cart of the kind used to load meal trays. He flew to Britain on a separate military plane. The press corps and some of his own staff remained on the original aircraft, believing he was aboard, with the blinds closed and the transponder switched off.
He does not want to go anywhere. When he is finally required to go somewhere, he arranges to be smuggled out of the going.
What it means, if it means anything
Every president before him used the office as a reason to be places. That was understood to be part of it. You go to the disaster, you go to the base, you go to the ally, you go to the town, because presence is the one thing the job supplies that a memo does not, and because a country is a physical object with people standing on it who would like, once, to see the person in charge.
He has inverted it. He has used the office as a mechanism for being carried to the four or five locations he already liked, at public expense, on a seasonal schedule, with the world available and declined.
He runs a country he has largely not visited. He has opinions about all of it, delivered nightly, in enormous volume, about places he has never stood in and people he has never met, and the opinions are extremely confident, because a thing you have not seen is easier to be certain about than a thing you have.
He has been to the same golf course in West Palm Beach forty-nine times.
There are 428 units in the National Park System. There are 19,495 incorporated places in the United States. He has been to a building he owns in Palm Beach 102 times, and when he finally left the continent, he went to a building he owns in Scotland, and when he came back from Turkey he did it inside the food.
He did go to Puerto Rico once to throw paper towels at people. 😝
If we manage to come out on the other side of this/him, the silver lining is that every flaw-by-omission in the Constitution has been brought to light. Let's hope we can, and do, get to work on fixing that. And apparently we need a "no jackasses" clause in there.