Thank God Trump Plays So Much Golf
Every second he spends slacking off is one he doesn’t spend fucking up America
The costs of shuffling U.S. president Donald Trump between the White House and his Mara-a-Lago resort in Florida is now more than $20 million. He’s on track to spend more on leisure travel in one year than Pres. Barack Obama did in eight years.
Air Force One alone costs $180,000 an hour to operate, which boosts to $700,000 the price of Trump’s roughly weekly round-trips to the Winter White House. The Secret Service alone has spent close to $35,000 on golf carts just to keep up with the golfer-in-chief. In the first 90 days, Trump has played the game 14 times.
This is how the most powerful man in the world spends his weekends — dicking around in his private club and charging the American people for the privilege.
And you know what? Good. It’ll cost us hundreds of millions of dollars to keep Trump in his Winter Palace slacking off instead of doing his job. But America will be better for it. Every moment Trump is golfing is a moment he’s not fucking up something else.
Which doesn’t mean bad men won’t act in his stead.
America’s founders understood that power corrupts. In designing the office of the president, they put in place systems to check the chief executive’s power. But for 50 years successive presidents have undermined those systems. And today the president’s laziness is one of the major checks left.
Thank God Trump is the laziest man to ever occupy the White House.
That doesn’t mean Trump can’t — and won’t — inflict damage. Every time advisors Steve Bannon or Jared Kushner slip some incendiary executive order under Trump’s nose, he’ll sign it without a second glance so he can get back to watching T.V.
The best we can hope for — until his inevitable death or impeachment — is that Trump spends as much time as possible watching cable news and golfing. Kushner and Bannon will pull of some shady shit, to be sure. But they’ll do it largely despite Trump rather than because of him.
Meanwhile, the federal bureaucracy will, Lord willing, continue to function in some fashion. There’s certainly precedent for this continuity.
In 1919, after a whirlwind tour of Europe and America, Pres. Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke. His wife Edith Boling Galt Wilson fended off the press, the cabinet and much of the legislature while Wilson languished. For the next year and a half, Edith ran the country like a boss while Wilson recovered from the partial paralyses resulting from his stroke.
Pres. Ronald Reagan had Alzheimer’s while in office. His own son Ron claimed he noticed his father’s declining mental faculties as early as his third year in office. During a famous debate with presidential hopeful Walter Mondale, Reagan seemed old and confused.
“My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses, fumbling with his notes, uncharacteristically lost for words,” Ron wrote in his 2011 memoir My Father at 100. “He looked tired and bewildered.”
“People didn’t talk about it,” a staffer told veteran White House correspondent Lesley Stahl. “People treated him with very special care. You had to explain things in elemental terms, but because he was so likable, everyone had so much personal regard for him — everyone protected him … He was intellectually vacant, but I never felt the country was in any danger.”
“A lot of people in very high positions — not just presidents — are surrounded by people who organize their lives and cover for them,” chief of psychiatry at the University of Miami Dr. David Loewenstein told ABC News. “I’ve seen cases where people are, frankly, demented and actually very impaired in doing their job, but they’re covered for successfully by their staff.”
What was true of Wilson and Reagan should be true of Trump. So The Donald should feel free to golf his orange heart out. The bureaucrats hopefully will do their jobs keeping the government running. And when Bannon and Kushner try to wreak havoc in an absent Trump’s name, we’ll fight them as hard as we would have fought Trump.
Stay defiant.
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