A quartet of Fox News panelists threw a fit on Monday because they believe that President Joe Biden has not been spending enough time playing golf.
Biden "was off Friday, Saturday, Sunday. He's off today, no events, and he's not even playing golf like other presidents. He can play at any course he wants to and he doesn't even play golf. It's like he's given up and the American people see it," host Jesse Watters complained.
"Because he's not playing golf," Watters' colleague, Greg Gutfield, interjected.
Watch below via Acyn:
Watters: He’s not even playing golf like other Presidents. He can play at any course he wants to and he doesn’t even play golf. It’s like he’s given up and the American people see it pic.twitter.com/1oedUQJXxu
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 6, 2022
Biden is known for returning to his house in Delaware on weekends, a routine that stretches back to the beginning of his decades-long career in the United States Senate and continued while he served as vice president from 2009 to 2017. But, now that he is the president, Biden has the ability to do his job from pretty much anywhere on the planet.
Biden's predecessor, former President Donald Trump, charged American taxpayers more than $141,000,000 on hundreds of golf outings at his numerous compounds during his single term as commander in chief, according to an October 31st, 2020 fact-check in USAToday.
Consequently, a significant portion of that money flowed into his family's coffers.
The Washington Post's Phillip Bump published an analysis of Trump's extensive golf tab shortly before Biden's inauguration on January 20th, 2021:
- 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.
