Donald Trump Blows As Much Taxpayer Money On Golf As Richest Pro Golfer Tiger Woods Earns Golfing

There should be some kind of official oversight regarding how much taxpayer money a president can spend on something as frivolous as weekly golf trips.

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Golf is an expensive sport. There are the clubs, the green fees, cart rental, and you have to buy enough drinks while you’re on the links to liven up the inherently boring nature of the game.

But Donald Trump’s spending on golf is just getting ridiculous. A recent exhaustive report put the total taxpayer tab for Trump’s golfing habit at $102 million thus far into his presidency.

That’s more than just green fees. Trump’s a teetotaler, so at least we save a few bucks there (not on his friends though, since the White House has a history of sticking taxpayers with the bar tab when Trump’s advisers are sucking down cocktails at Mar-a-Lago at an average price of $18.62 each). But unlike most of the generally well-to-do golfing public, Trump has the luxury of flying a private plane, whenever he wants, to his own golf course at taxpayer expense. Then, every time Trump visits Mar-a-Lago, there’s the $57,000 it costs all of us for Marine One helicopter flights, the $800,000 it costs to transport seven-ton presidential limousines and other vehicles, and the $855,000 we have to pay for the U.S. Coast Guard to implement special coastal patrols near Trump’s golf course when he is in town.

Even the regular sort of golfing expenses get pretty inflated when it is Trump’s entourage incurring them. A database review by the publication Quartz found that Trump’s golf cart rental expenses alone have totaled nearly half a million dollars since he was sworn in. Over the coming summer, the Secret Service has allocated $95,250 to rent golf carts just in Bedminster, New Jersey, to follow the president around while he plays golf at the Trump International Golf Club (the $95,250 estimate might be an optimistic one, as last summer the Secret Service allocated $60,000 for golf cart rentals but wound up spending more like $120,000).

Of course, all of this would be embarrassing to Trump and his loyal personality cult if they retained any capacity for shame, given how much time they spent excoriating Obama for his own golf habit during his presidency. It was even a Trump campaign promise that if elected, he was “not going to have time to play golf.” “I just want to stay in the White House and work my ass off,” the future president said. Well, at the equivalent stage in his presidency, Obama had golfed on 70 days, mostly at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington; Trump has now golfed at least 178 days during his time in office, which is more than one out of every five days he has spent in office. During Obama’s entire eight-year term, Obama spent $30 million on out-of-town golf expenses, less than a third of what Trump has already spent just two-and-a-half years into his first term.

Apparently, we’re all paying for the golf-related expenses of Trump’s rotten adult children as well. In February of 2017, for instance, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump traveled to Dubai to open a Trump-branded golf club, and the Secret Service spent more than $200,000 on airfare, hotel rooms, and “miscellaneous expenses” to accompany the pair during the trip. More recently, in May, the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a records request to find out how much taxpayers spent to provide security for Eric Trump while he took a golf trip to Trump courses in Scotland.

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Because golf comparisons are fun, Tiger Woods, still the highest-paid pro golfer in the world, earns almost exactly enough to just barely hypothetically cover the money spent so Trump can golf multiple times each week. According to a Forbes calculation, Mr. Woods earned a total of $43.3 million in 2017, the vast majority of that ($42 million) from endorsements and the remainder as salary/winnings from actually playing golf. If you can assume that Woods’s earnings have remained relatively consistent so far during Trump’s first term, his pre-tax income would be just a smidge over Donald Trump’s $102 million presidential golf tab to date. But even through Trump awarded Mr. Woods the Presidential Medal of Freedom this May, I’m sure Tiger’s gratitude doesn’t go so far as to justify picking up the check. Unlike taxpayers, he has a choice about it.

The point here is not just to bash Trump, even though he definitely deserves it. The bigger issue is that there should be some kind of official oversight — there should be some accountability — regarding how much taxpayer money a president can spend on something as frivolous as weekly golf trips. Trump’s voter base certainly isn’t going to provide it. In the past, it might have been enough for these types of articles to shame a president into behaving more responsibly with taxpayer funds. But that’s over now. We all need to accept that norms are out the window, and that continuing to rely on them is costing us bigly.


Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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