Trump Is Racking Up a Colossal Tab Just Playing Golf

Donald Trump has already spent $70 million of taxpayer money on golfing in less than a year as president. If this pace keeps up, he will spend $300 million playing golf by the time his second term ends. 

HuffPost reports that the president on Wednesday made his sixteenth trip this year to his Mar-a-Lago estate and went golfing. Each trip carries a $3.4 million bill in travel and security costs. If Trump decides to go to Mar-a-Lago twice more before the end of the year, he will have spent a total of $75 million on golf, which, repeated each of the following three years, would result in $300 million spent on the trips.

That’s nearly double the $151.5 million in tax dollars Trump spent golfing in his first term as president. Trump spent a third of 2017, his first year as president, hanging out at his private clubs. This time, Trump has also made nine trips to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, spending $1.1 million on each trip. He also went to Aberdeen, Scotland, in July to promote a new golf course at his resort there, spending close to $10 million on the trip.  

The security costs Trump incurs on his Florida trips can get pretty high, with machine gun–mounted patrol boats manning the nearby Intracoastal Waterway and the Coast Guard patrolling in the vicinity in the Atlantic Ocean. Using Air Force One costs $273,063 per hour to fly to Palm Beach International Airport, meaning that one four-hour round trip to Mar-a-Lago costs the taxpayer $1.1 million. 

In 2016, before Trump was elected, he mocked President Obama’s work ethic, claiming that he was “worse than Carter” for how often he golfed. In the end, Obama only spent $85 million of taxpayer dollars in his eight years as president on golf. 

Meanwhile, Trump has not only eclipsed that in his nearly five years as president, he’s shaped his presidency around golf. He has promoted his golf business on the White House social platform and even decided to deploy the National Guard in Washington, D.C., because he hated seeing homeless people on his way to play golf. 

Last month, Trump took dirt from his White House demolition and sent it to a golf course he’s taking over in Washington. It’s a fitting act for his presidency: taking something from the taxpayer and putting it toward playing an expensive game that he appears to cheat at. 

President Trump has finally released the names of 46 wealthy donors who bankrolled his transition into office. The list predictably consists of billionaires, lobbyists, and people Trump appointed into his Cabinet.

The donors raised just over $14 million, although the Trump administration didn’t clarify who donated what.

“President Trump greatly appreciates his supporters and donors; however, unlike politicians of the past, he is not bought by anyone and does what’s in the best interest of the country,” Trump transition spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez told The New York Times. “Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”

That statement is dubious, at best.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff—all of whom are at least millionaires (McMahon and Lutnick are billionaires)—are listed as donors. So are Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodard Jr. and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio Dominick Gerace II.

Billionaire businessmen Jeff Yass and Paul Singer are also listed.

This list was delayed because the Trump transition team refused to sign the General Services Administration agreement requiring them to disclose the names of their donors and the amounts donated within 30 days of the inauguration.

Here are the donors:

Linda McMahon

Howard Lutnick

Robert Johnson

Suzanne Johnson

Marlene Ricketts

Robert Bishop

Samantha George

Stephen Plaster

Adam Clampitt

Jeff Yass

Paul Singer

Steve Witkoff

Robert Bigelow

Stanley Woodward

Gene Ventura

Andrew Cuff

Elias Levy

Jeff Littlejohn

Stephen Dewey

Robert Turley

James Tuell

Michael Desmond

Susan Silverie

Jonathan Slemrod

Thomas Schiavone

Marcel Kaminstein

Conor Sheehey

Wade Eyerly

Robert Foran

Kenneth Bridger Roy

Dominick Gerace

Kameel Ali

Matthew Iager

Robert Newton

Anita Winsor

Jeremy Isenberg

Scott Pillath

Harry Jackson

Douglas deWysocki

Jesus Cuartas

Thomas Griffy

Frederick Wilson

Charles Mccarthy

Hector Wong

Brigette Frantz

Catalina Lamontain

It looks like Donald Trump and Alina Habba won’t be getting out of that pesky nearly $1 million fine for filing a particularly petty lawsuit against the president’s political foes.

In a 36-page ruling Wednesday, an Atlanta-based federal appeals court panel unanimously affirmed that Trump and his lawyer had committed “sanctionable conduct” in filing a “frivolous” lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey.

“Many of Trump’s and Habba’s legal arguments were indeed frivolous,” wrote Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge William Pryor Jr., meaning that the claims were fictitious and likely intended to harass, delay, or embarrass the defendants. Pryor was joined by Trump appointee Andrew Brasher and Biden appointee Embry Kidd.

Trump had sued Clinton, Comey, and others in 2022, accusing them of a racketeering conspiracy to invent false claims that his first presidential campaign had collaborated with Russia. A district court dismissed the case in January 2023 and jointly fined Habba and Trump $932,989.39.

Pryor referred to a district court’s previous findings that Trump had made a “malicious prosecution claim without a prosecution” and a “trade secret claim without a trade secret,” among others. “Trump and Habba give us no reason to reverse the district court’s ruling that these claims were frivolous,” he wrote.

The judge also wrote that the district court “did not clearly err” in determining that Trump had shown a “pattern of misusing the courts.”

Last week, a different federal appeals court panel affirmed the dismissal of Trump’s $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN for using the term “the Big Lie,” calling the president’s claims “unpersuasive” and “meritless.” In September, a federal judge dismissed the president’s $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, stating it was chock full of “tedious and burdensome” language that had nothing to do with the case itself.

The president’s ballroom obsession has put him at odds with the project’s architect, who doesn’t see eye to eye with him on the ballroom’s proposed size.

Donald Trump handpicked James McCrery II for the job. But several insiders that spoke with The Washington Post said that the two have not agreed on the scope of the project, with McCrery reportedly arguing that the 90,000-square-foot blueprint would overshadow the 55,000-square-foot White House mansion, violating basic architectural principles.

A White House official acknowledged that the pair has disagreed but would not provide specifics.

“As with any building, there is a conversation between the principal and the architect,” the unidentified official told the Post. “All parties are excited to execute on the president’s vision on what will be the greatest addition to the White House since the Oval Office.”

After promising Americans in July that his ballroom proposal would “be near but not touching” the White House East Wing, Trump completely razed the FDR-era extension in October, plowing forward without prerequisite approval from the National Capital Planning Commission or the express permission of Congress. Conveniently, Trump started demolition during the government shutdown, when the NCPC was consequently closed.

The Trump administration said that the forthcoming 90,000-square-foot event space will be capable of hosting 650 people, a 200-person bump from current maximum seating at the White House East Wing. But real estate experts have since pointed out that the possibilities of that square footage should be much broader, considering that a space of that size will be roughly equivalent to two football fields.

The project’s price tag also inexplicably grew by 50 percent after Trump began tearing down the East Wing. What Trump had originally pitched as a $200 million project was instead referred to in late October as a $300 million development plan. The White House suggested that the project would be funded, in part, by some of the country’s wealthiest families and biggest corporations, including the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.

Some major players in the defense industry with massive federal contracts, including Lockheed Martin and Palantir, have also forked over significant cash to develop the ballroom, though it’s unclear what they might get out of a venue designed for dancing.

The White House’s partial destruction is, ultimately, another illustration that the country’s constitutional system of checks and balances has eroded. The international real estate mogul’s desire to destroy the government—and with it, the architectural face of American democracy—has received practically zero pushback from his allies in Congress, who appear all too willing to sit back as Trump courts billionaires to fund his golden banquet hall.

Administration officials close to the project told the Post that Trump has, at times, micromanaged his eponymously styled ballroom, spearheading frequent meetings about its design. Other reports indicate that he has become so fixated on his renovation project that he has literally wandered away from his presidential duties in order to admire its progress.

MAGA Republicans accused a Democrat running against Vivek Ramawamy for Ohio governor of posting an AI-generated video of the DOGE czar-for-a-day pitching a truly terrible policy idea. Too bad for them, because the video was actually real.

Former Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton, a Democratic primary candidate for governor in Ohio, shared a clip on X Monday that showed Ramaswamy pitching an outrageous idea to lower the cost of childcare.

“Make parenting more affordable by making school year-round and going to four o’clock instead of three o’clock, so you don’t have to pay for childcare,” Ramaswamy said in the video.

That proposal was so blatantly bad that Republicans immediately started to accuse Acton of sharing a fake video. Far-right commentator Tim Pool claimed on his show Tuesday that the video Acton shared was AI and that the audio had been “replaced.” He aired an edited version of the video pulled from Ramaswamy’s social media that appeared not to include the Republican’s proposal to extend school hours. “If we are playing this game, we are done,” Pool said, arguing that Ramaswamy ought to sue his opponent.

MAGA influencer Austin Padgett claimed in a post on X that the video was “probably the most successful example of a political deepfake I’ve seen so far.”

And Gabe Guidarini, chairman of the Ohio College Republicans Federation, also railed against candidates sharing manipulated videos. “If you’re a candidate and you share AI-altered videos of another candidate and pass it off as reality, you should be fined a lot of money,” Guidarini wrote on X.

But they couldn’t have been more wrong—as Acton noted in a reply to Guidarini. “Agreed. The bad news for Vivek Ramaswamy is that his plans for Ohio are so backwards, his own party is convinced they’re AI,” she wrote on X. “Spoiler alert: they’re not.”

It turns out, the only one manipulating the video was Ramaswamy. The full video was originally posted to Ramaswamy’s social media accounts before being removed. Another version of the video was later reposted without the Republican’s plan to extend school hours, according to The Columbus Dispatch.

Some MAGA accounts backed off their claims that Acton’s video was fake. “Never mind, this does not appear to be AI. It seems Vivek did post this, then reposted it with the year-round school part removed. However, he forgot to re-edit it on his Threads account (forgot that site existed),” America First Insights wrote on X. “Year round school is such ‘only GDP going up matters’ thinking.”