President Donald Trump has been busy during the longest federal government shutdown in history.
While other presidents have largely kept their activities narrowly focused on helping end past government shutdowns, Trump has visited six countries, spoken at a million-dollar-per-plate dinner, undertaken a massive construction project at the White House and gone golfing more than a half-dozen times. Among his activities: a “Great Gatsby”-themed party at Mar-a-Lago on the eve of the scheduled suspension of food assistance benefits.
President Donald Trump has been busy during the longest federal government shutdown in history.
While other presidents have largely kept their activities narrowly focused on helping end past government shutdowns, Trump has visited six countries, spoken at a million-dollar-per-plate dinner, undertaken a massive construction project at the White House and gone golfing more than a half-dozen times. Among his activities: a “Great Gatsby”-themed party at Mar-a-Lago on the eve of the scheduled suspension of food assistance benefits.
Historians say Trump’s agenda over the last 40-plus days marks a notable departure from how previous presidents have operated during government shutdowns, citing his lack of visible participation in negotiating a bipartisan agreement and his administration’s unprecedented use of executive branch powers to ratchet up pressure on Democrats to give in to Republicans’ demands.
The White House defended Trump’s approach to governance during the shutdown.
“While Democrats shut down the government to use struggling American families … as ‘leverage’ for their radical political agenda, President Trump continued to work night and day on behalf of American people — including mitigating many of the harmful impacts of the Democrat shutdown,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement.
Here’s what Trump has been up to since the government shut down on Oct. 1:
Trump spent time in six foreign nations — not counting nations where he stopped to refuel Air Force One. Those countries are: Israel, Egypt, Qatar, Malaysia, Japan and South Korea. Trump signed several trade agreements and oversaw the signing of two ceasefire agreements on those trips.
Among modern presidents who have led the country during a government shutdown, Trump stands out as the only recent president to have traveled abroad while Congress remained deadlocked.
During the 2013 shutdown that lasted over two weeks, for example, President Barack Obama did not leave the Washington region, and President Bill Clinton restricted himself to traveling domestically during a pair of shutdowns that occurred in late 1995 and early 1996. Both Clinton and Obama also nixed trips to Asia for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings, which Trump attended last month.
Trump visited U.S. troops at air bases in Iraq and Germany after a partial shutdown began in late 2018, shortly after Christmas that year. However, he canceled a planned trip to Afghanistan by Pelosi, who was House Speaker at the time, calling it a “public relations event.” He wrote in a letter released publicly at the time, “It would be better if you were in Washington negotiating with me and joining the Strong Border Security movement to end the Shutdown.”
Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian, said that before Trump’s presidency, “it was a presidential norm” to stay in D.C. during a shutdown.
“Now, we all know that it doesn’t really matter where a president is, because they’re in communication wherever they are. But being in Washington means you are able to meet with congressional leaders if necessary to move the process along,” said Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “ … Maybe the American people didn’t care so much about him being in D.C., but what he was doing in D.C. seemed out of touch with the government crisis going on around him.”
Trump hosted nine international leaders at the White House, including NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who became that country’s first leader to visit the White House. Trump’s Nov. 7 meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and subsequent travel to his Mar-a-Lago Club that day coincided with the first day of mass flight cancellations at major airports across the United States. The cancellations were made in compliance with an administration order to reduce air traffic amid concerns about the impact of potential staffing shortages resulting from the shutdown.
Trade and the wars in Gaza and Ukraine were the top topics of conversation at the meetings with international leaders.
Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the day before the 2013 shutdown began and then-Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta on the day that the shutdown ended. He also met privately with Malala Yousafzai during the shutdown.
Wrecking crews completely removed the decades-old East Wing of the White House in mid-October to make room for Trump’s massive planned ballroom.
Earlier in the month, news photographers inside the Oval Office snapped a mock-up model of a stone arch across from the Lincoln Memorial. White House officials are considering plans to install it as a permanent arch, a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations previously told The Washington Post.
On Halloween, Trump said he inspected taxpayer-funded renovations on the Kennedy Center, which has seen ticket sales plummet since the president took it over, according to a Post analysis. That same day, he unveiled an overhaul of the Lincoln Bathroom, sharing images that highlight his choice of marble accented with golden fixtures.
Trump publicly advertised few events in which he engaged in negotiations to end the shutdown. He hosted Republican lawmakers at two White House events: a “Rose Garden Club” gathering on Oct. 21 and a White House breakfast on Nov. 5.
Doug Heye, who served as the deputy chief of staff to then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) during the 2013 government shutdown, said that the party dynamics of the 2025 shutdown present a unique scenario. Unlike the 2013 shutdown, Republicans are in power in both chambers of Congress and the presidency — though they lack the necessary numbers in the Senate to break a filibuster.
“Could Trump have brought (Senate Minority Leader Charles E.) Schumer and (House Minority Leader Hakeem) Jeffries in more? Sure, but that wouldn’t necessarily accomplish anything,” Heye said. “Obviously, Schumer voted [against reopening the government this weekend] as well, and I will find curious an argument from Democrats that what they needed was more time with Donald Trump. Because everything else they say … is that it is precisely what is not needed.”
Ultimately, Trump’s and Republicans’ refusal to engage in negotiations was effective, Heye argued.
Trump went to two donor dinners, one of which he hosted at the White House for those who gave money to his ballroom construction project. The other was hosted by super PAC MAGA Inc., which charged $1 million per plate for a dinner at which Trump was the featured speaker. The president attended a “Great Gatsby”-themed party on Halloween at his Mar-a-Lago Club — the day before Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients were scheduled to lose their benefits.
John Lawrence, professor at the University of California Washington Center and former chief of staff to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California), called Trump’s behavior “a studied indifference.”
“If there was a miscalculation that was made by Democrats, it was that Trump would engage,” Lawrence said. “ … The president, far from being an agent that was promoting an effort to resolve the shutdown, was really exalting in a role as a provocateur, making it harder and harder to find common ground by taking these kinds of unilateral actions.”
Like other presidents, Trump has done several high-profile interviews during the shutdown, including with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Time magazine, ESPN and CNN. He has also done interviews with conservative news outlets, such as Newsmax and Fox News — where he interviewed with Sean Hannity on Oct. 8, Maria Bartiromo eight days later and Bret Baier on Nov. 5.
Despite his high-profile interviews, most polling throughout the shutdown showed Americans blamed Trump and Republicans more than Democrats, though that margin has narrowed over time.
Trump signed several acts of clemency, including a commutation for Republican former New York congressman George Santos as well as pardons for Major League Baseball star Darryl Strawberry, crypto founder Changpeng Zhao, former Tennessee House speaker Glen Casada — and his former chief of staff Cade Cothren. He also pardoned more than 75 people involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election, including Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell.
Trump has played golf seven times — twice at the Trump National Golf Club in Loudoun County, Virginia, and five times at the Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump, like many other U.S. presidents, has long loved golf, and his many outings to the links during his first term sparked intense criticism. It’s a pattern that carried into his second term — he golfed 10 times in his first month back in office. The pace hardly slowed once the government was shuttered.
While Democratic lawmakers were eager to tackle health care subsidies, Trump had other health care-related plans. He announced two medical care price reduction plans, one to lower the cost of weight loss drugs for Medicare and Medicaid patients and the other to lower the cost of in vitro fertilization and fertility drugs. The plans are part of Trump’s larger efforts to get “most favored nation” pricing for drugs in the United States.
There’s precedent for past presidents to make major announcements and hold White House ceremonies during government shutdowns.
In the middle of the 2013 shutdown, for example, Obama held a Medal of Honor ceremony and announced he would nominate Janet L. Yellen to serve as the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve. During the shutdown that took place through the 1995 December holidays and beyond New Year’s Day of 1996, the White House continued to host holiday parties and bill signings, according to archives of Clinton’s daily schedule.
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