Friday: Trump ‘couldn’t care less about golf.’ Sunday: Trump’s likely 18th round

[GMDino]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/05/01/friday-trump-couldnt-care-less-about-golf-sunday-trumps-likely-18th-round/?utm_term=.4c03eb5f64ab

Quote:It takes Donald Trump a bit under four hours to play a round of golf. We know this because on all of the various occasions that Trump disappears into one of his golf clubs while the White House press corps waits outside, he usually disappears for about four hours — and that includes those occasions when we’ve learned that Trump actually did play a round. The White House is cagey about this, recognizing, perhaps, that Trump’s penchant for the sport is somewhat at odds with his repeated insistence on the campaign trail that Barack Obama was spending too much time on the links.


How sensitive is Donald Trump about the perception that he plays golf all the time? He raised it with Fox News’s Martha MacCallum during an interview that aired Friday night.


“I have a lot of property. So if I go to one of my clubs, like in New Jersey, they’ll say, ‘he’s going to play golf.’ I’m not going to play golf. I couldn’t care less about golf, but I have a place there,” Trump told MacCallum. A bit later, he added: “The problem is every time I go to a club, they say, ‘He’s out there having fun.’ I’m not having fun. When I go to a club, I’m working.”

That segment aired Friday night at 7 p.m. Eastern. Less than two days later, Trump had completed what was, by our count, his 18th golf outing since he’s been president — a rate of one game every 5.7 days of his presidency, easily outpacing the rate of once every 8.8 days for which Trump repeatedly blasted Obama.



What’s more, there are only two occasions on which we know that Trump brought work out onto the green with him. When the prime minister of Japan visited in early February, he and Trump played a round, accompanied by golf pro Ernie Els. In early April, Trump was joined by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) at his club in Virginia. Beyond that, the composition of his foursomes has been largely kept under wraps. We do know that he played with Irish pro Rory McIlroy in February; after coming under fire for the outing, McIlroy told the press explicitly that he and Trump hadn’t talked politics, only golf.
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Again, we can’t say positively that Trump played golf on each of the other 15 occasions. On some, images later emerged on social media of Trump puttering around in a golf cart, suggesting that our hunch about how he may have been spending multiple hours at golf clubs he owns was correct. If every other occasion on which Trump’s vanished into one of his private golf clubs was, as he asserts, simply a change of venue for his constant work on behalf of the American public, it’s often unclear with whom he may be meeting; the White House never reveals any such information.


The simplest and probably correct explanation is that Trump actually does care about golf, and that he is having fun when he goes to his golf clubs. At four hours a pop, Trump has spent the equivalent of three full days playing golf since he became president per our estimate. If he’s not having fun, he should probably stop doing it.