Trump Is Racking Up a Colossal Golf Tab—On the Taxpayers’ Dime

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.”

A Georgia judge has officially dismissed the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) case against President Donald Trump and his allies for interfering in the 2020 election. 

The RICO charges—filed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in 2023—were connected to Trump’s alleged attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden. This is a significant victory for Trump and co., as this case was initially seen as a potential campaign killer for him. 

Prosecutor Peter Skandalakis—who replaced Willis on the case after she was removed by an appeals court for the “appearance of impropriety” caused by her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade—filed a motion to drop the case in order “to serve the interests of justice and promote judicial finality.”

A judge approved his motion Wednesday.

“Given the complexity of the legal issues at hand—ranging from constitutional questions and the Supremacy Clause to immunity, jurisdiction, venue, speedy-trial concerns, and access to federal records—and even assuming each of these issues were resolved in the State’s favor, bringing this case before a jury in 2029, 2030, or even 2031 would be nothing short of a remarkable feat,” Skandalakis wrote in his explanation for why he dropped the case. “The timeline of events outlined at the beginning of this report demonstrates just how difficult it is to move appellate issues through the courts with any degree of speed.” 

The original indictment had 13 criminal counts against Trump, and implicated many of his personal lawyers, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis, and Ray Smith. 

The case surrounded a 2021 phone call from Trump to  Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which he pleaded with him to “find” 11,780 votes—the exact number needed to beat Biden in Georgia. The indictment also alleged that Powell paid a group of Trump supporters to access voting machines at the county’s election office to copy sensitive data and upload them to a site for election deniers as evidence of a rigged election. 

While Trump was certainly angered by the indictment, it never seemed to damage him politically, as he went on to win the presidency a second time. 

This story has been updated. 

House Democrats, led by Representative Jamie Raskin, are trying to force Republicans on the record against Ghislaine Maxwell.

Raskin introduced a resolution Wednesday “expressing the opposition of the House of Representatives to any grant of commutation, clemency, or pardon to federal convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, who refuses to take responsibility for her crimes.”

Maxwell was the accomplice of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Over the past month, the House Oversight Committee has released several damning emails from Epstein’s estate detailing his and Maxwell’s network of contacts, including President Trump. The president has not ruled out commuting Maxwell’s 20-year prison sentence or even pardoning her.

“Ghislaine Maxwell is the exact opposite of the kind of prisoner who deserves a pardon. She continues to lie about the crimes she committed and enabled, continues to disparage and denigrate the women who she victimized and continues to cover up for perhaps the worst global sex-trafficking conspiracy ever run out of the United States,” Raskin said in a statement.

“Every Member should support this Resolution to send a clear and unequivocal message in advance to President Donald Trump before he makes a mockery of the pardon power once again,” Raskin added. “America opposes the grant of any get-out-of-jail-free card to the unrepentant, unremorseful liar and criminal who was an indispensable actor in a vicious billion-dollar international child sex trafficking ring.”

Over the summer, Maxwell gave an interview to the Department of Justice claiming that she never saw Trump doing anything improper and that he wasn’t close to Epstein, which seems to be a lie. Shortly after that meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Maxwell was transferred to a minimum-security facility in Texas, where she has enjoyed a cushy life, getting perks such as secret meetings in the prison chapel, meal service in her cell, and unlimited toilet paper.

Last week, Maxwell said she wouldn’t cooperate with a House Oversight Committee probe into Epstein and how the DOJ handled his case. Trump still might pardon her anyway, but Raskin and other Democrats are hoping to make sure that GOP representatives are on the record first.

Just one hour after angrily ranting about how he is in perfect physical and mental health, President Donald Trump was posting about how his supporters should be called “Tpublicans.”

“There is a new word for a TRUMP REPUBLICAN, which is almost everyone (GREAT POLICY IS THE KEY!),” he mused Wednesday morning on Truth Social. “It is, TEPUBLICAN??? Or, TPUBLICAN???

The president may want to go back to the drawing board here, as neither of these really roll off the tongue well.

More importantly, posts like these don’t do much to instill faith in his mental acuity—especially the morning after a report from The New York Times that noted his slowed schedule compared to his first term, suggesting his age is impacting his ability to govern. The report also mentioned his moments of grogginess, his usual incoherent ramblings, and his more recent existential comments about his chances at getting into heaven.

This set the president off, claiming that he had “never worked so hard” in his life, and that all those facts showed that the Times—which he again referred to as a “rag”—was lying. But his “Tepublican” posting doesn’t exactly bolster his case.

Even military veterans and people not in public office are receiving death threats for standing up to Donald Trump’s unlawful commands.

Days after the president called for the “death” of several Democratic lawmakers who reminded America’s service members to follow the rule of law, Richard Ojeda—a retired Army major running as a Democrat for North Carolina’s 9th congressional district—joined a choir of ex-military voices elevating their message. In a video statement, Ojeda urged members of America’s military and intelligence community to refuse unlawful orders issued by their commander in chief.

“As a former leader who spent 24 years in service to this country, I think it’s important to remind everyone that we teach our soldiers … that if they are ever given an order that is unlawful, illegal, or immoral, it is their duty to refuse those orders,” Ojeda said in the video last week. “This isn’t rocket science.”

It was apparently, however, fuel for Libs of Tiktok’s Chaya Raichik, who shared the clip with her 4.5 million followers on Twitter alongside an incendiary claim that Ojeda was urging America’s military to “REFUSE and DEFY orders from Trump.”

That post made over a million impressions. It also put Ojeda in enough danger that he said he received a visit from the FBI, who warned him they had observed several threats for him to be “shot on sight.”

But the death threats have done little more than inspire him to “invest in a decent gate.” Ojeda, a former West Virginia state senator, told The New Republic that he’s “not going to be bullied” from running for office, let alone stating the law.

Ojeda cautioned that America’s service members aren’t safe from prosecution simply because they were following orders. Instead, he said that they could be the ones left holding the bag for carrying out Trump’s indiscretions long after he leaves office.

“He is by far the most corrupt man to ever occupy the office, period,” Ojeda told TNR.

In a Facebook post on Saturday, Ojeda noted he wasn’t fazed by the death threats. “I don’t want hardworking men and women in the U.S. military to end up prosecuted because the draft dodger in the White House ordered them to break the law,” he wrote.

He pointed to the Trump administration’s recent wave of airstrikes against small boats in the Caribbean as a prime example. Pentagon officials have claimed that the boats were trafficking narcotics to the U.S. from Venezuela and Colombia, despite skipping out on any typical investigations or interdictions that would provide such evidence.

The White House’s careless killing spree has so far killed at least 83 people aboard the tiny watercraft. It has also rallied tens of thousands of Venezuelans in favor of war against the United States.

The attacks have been condemned by U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and foreign human rights advocates alike, including the United Nations’ human rights chief.

It’s been a week since six Democratic members of the House and Senate—a coalition of veterans and former national security professionals—urged service members not to “give up the ship.” In a video statement posted to Facebook, the bloc repeated that America’s military and intelligence communities “can” and “must … refuse illegal orders.” They made no reference to disobeying Trump directly, only reminding people to uphold the Constitution.

But that didn’t stop Trump from taking things personally. He responded to the video Thursday by warning that “their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???” He followed up on that Truth Social post an hour later by calling for their “DEATH.”

Dissent under the Trump administration has become a tenuous game, with militant vigilante groups ready and willing to act on Trump’s behalf to silence his critics. Just in June, a Trump supporter allegedly assassinated Minnesota Democratic state Senator Melissa Hortman, her husband, and their dog, and allegedly attempted to assassinate Democratic state Senator John Hoffman.

Ojeda is still just a primary candidate, far from actually holding public office, and yet his perceived slight to Trump has put him in enough danger that the FBI took notice.

Weighing the volatile reaction he received from the American public for what should be an uncontroversial stance, Ojeda commented to TNR that Trump’s more outspoken opponents are probably facing even more heat.

“With the temperature that’s going across this country, it wouldn’t surprise me if all elected officials aren’t catching flack from folks,” he said.

President Trump was sent into a Truth Social rage after The New York Times reported on what appears to be a serious drop in his energy compared to his first term, as he is attending fewer events and starting them much later.

As the report highlighted, the Roll Call official presidential schedule database shows that in his first term, Trump arrived at scheduled events by 10:31 a.m. on average. Now he starts about 90 minutes later, at 12:08 p.m. From January 20 to November 25 in his first term, Trump held 1,688 official events. This term, that number is at 1,029 by the same point, a 39 percent decrease. His days still end around 5 p.m., as in his first term.

The Times also noted Trump’s apparent grogginess, his classic ramblings, and his existential musings about death.

This report got the president posting bright and early Wednesday morning—nearly a full five hours before his typical scheduled event arrival.

“The Creeps at the Failing New York Times are at it again … I settled 8 Wars, have 48 New Stock Market Highs, our Economy is Great, and our Country is RESPECTED AGAIN all over the World, respected like never before. The last Administration had the Highest Inflation in history—I have already brought that down to normal, and prices, including groceries, are coming down,” Trump wrote. “To do this requires a lot of Work and Energy, and I have never worked so hard in my life. Yet despite all of this the Radical Left Lunatics in the soon to fold New York Times did a hit piece on me that I am perhaps losing my Energy, despite facts that show the exact opposite.”

Those “facts” are a bit murky.

In 2020, Mr. Trump weighed in at six-foot-three, 244 pounds—a frame that used to be classified as obese. In 2025, his physician, Dr. Sean P. Barbabella, had him down to 224 pounds, still overweight. Trump also reportedly loves red meat, McDonald’s, and candy.

“President Trump exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the commander in chief and head of state,” Barbabella said in April.

Others note that while he appears to be up and running at these events and Oval Office appearances, we really have no clue what goes on afterward—or what happens when he goes into his golf clubs every weekend.

“[Trump’s aides] show him as effective,” former White House physician Dr. Jeffrey Kuhlman told the Times, “but every time he’s in the Oval Office, he’s sedentary.”

While Kuhlman thinks it’s “commendable” that Trump uses the Air Force One stairs, “you don’t know what he does as soon as he walks in the door.”

Political historian Matthew Dallek drew comparisons between how Trump’s and Biden’s teams have presented their health.

“The people around him are similar to Biden’s aides,” he said. “They would talk as if we’re living in a little bit of a fantasy world. Trump, in that way, with the help of his aides and his doctors, [has] created this fiction about his health to hide the hard, cold truth that he is 79 and one of the oldest people to ever occupy the Oval Office.”

To Trump’s credit, he has completed more international trips than he did in his first term. And even at a lower rate, he is still (just ever so slightly) more active and alert than President Biden was. When taking his constant dialogue with the media and his near-prolific social media posting into account, Trump is perhaps—for better or worse—the most accessible president of the century. But it’s unclear how much longer that can last.

“They know this is wrong, as is almost every thing that they write about me, including election results, ALL PURPOSELY NEGATIVE. This cheap ‘RAG’ is truly an ‘ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.’ The writer of the story, Katie Rogers, who is assigned to write only bad things about me, is a third rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out,” Trump continued in his reaction post. “Despite all of this, I have my highest Poll Numbers, ever, and with record setting investment being made in America, they should only go up. There will be a day when I run low on Energy, it happens to everyone, but with a PERFECT PHYSICAL EXAM AND A COMPREHENSIVE COGNITIVE TEST (‘That was aced’) JUST RECENTLY TAKEN, it certainly is not now! GOD BLESS AMERICA & MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”