President Donald Trump was at a golf course in Virginia over Memorial Day weekend, golfing for the 265th time since becoming president as the US death toll from COVID-19 ticked closer to 100,000.
The activity prompted plenty of criticism, which he pushed back against in a handful of tweets Tuesday by blaming former President Barack Obama.
Trump apparently feels he’s being held to an unfair “double standard” since Obama also recently went golfing. But one of these men is currently the U.S. president; the other is not.
Obama’s golf game has preoccupied Trump for years, long before Trump even took office.
In December 2011, Trump accused then-President Obama of playing golf “to escape work while America goes down the drain.”
In 2014 he tweeted, “Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the US, President Obama spent the day playing golf.”
As with so many of Trump’s tweets, they’re now starkly hypocritical. The amount of days Trump has spent on a golf course is more than two and a half times Obama’s total at the same point in his first term.
Worse, Trump’s insistence on playing at his own courses means Trump is lining his pockets at taxpayers’ expense every time he hits the links. To date, Trump’s golf tab has cost taxpayers more than $133.8 million ― equal to 334 years of the presidential salary that Trump and his supporters frequently boast he isn’t taking.
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