More than 750,000 federal workers are either furloughed or working without pay after Republicans and Democrats failed to reach a funding deal, and Donald Trump is playing golf.
The president’s motorcade reportedly left the White House at roughly 10 a.m. Saturday morning, bound for Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.
His leisure outing comes as Republicans throw the kitchen sink at Democrats, blaming the party for the shutdown, after both sides failed to reach an agreement on Wednesday for funding amid a deadlock on issues of healthcare, foreign aid and regulatory rollbacks.
The websites of multiple federal agencies now display messages attributing the shutdown to the actions of Senate Democrats, with some federal employees’ out-of-office messages now following suit in what critics have described as a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits the use of official channels for political messaging.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson has also publicly accused Democrats of prioritizing healthcare for undocumented immigrants, despite visa-less migrants being ineligible for federal healthcare programs, after Trump himself posted similar claims in an AI-generated video featuring House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero and moustache as mariachi music played in the background.
Critics, meanwhile, have raised alarm that the Trump administration may now seek to weaponize the hiatus as a means of furthering its slash-and-burn campaign of cutbacks to the federal bureaucracy.
It is hardly the first time the president has golfed his way through a moment of national crisis. In early April 2017, Trump was spotted reading the green at Mar-a-Lago amid widespread alarm over North Korea conducting a series of ballistic missile tests.
When Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico later that September, the president faced intense criticism after jetting off to his course in New Jersey as the unincorporated territory suffered from food and water shortages amid widespread power outages.
The following February, Trump sparked further outrage for spending more time at Mar-a-Lago as the nation grieved victims of the Parkland school shooting, and again for hosting a wedding at his Bedminster Golf Club at the time of two mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton in August 2019.
It’s also reportedly from Mar-a-Lago that in January 2020, the president not only made the decision to assassinate Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, but also watched from afar his own impeachment trial in the Senate. He repeatedly visited that club and another in Virginia throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since assuming the presidency for the second time earlier this year, Trump has also golfed as stock markets plunged in the aftermath of his “Liberation Day” tariffs earlier in April, and as central Texas reeled from devastating flash-floods in early July.
According to an online tracker, set up under the domain name didtrumpgolftoday.com, the president has golfed 64 out of the 258 days since his inauguration on January 20, at an estimated cost of $89.6 million to the U.S. taxpayer.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
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