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How do Trump golf travel costs compare to other presidents like Barack Obama and Joe Biden?
Executive summary
Donald Trump’s golf-related travel has been reported as substantially costly to taxpayers, with published estimates ranging from $18 million in recent accounting to $151.5 million for time spent at one course during his presidency, driven by high per-trip security and transport expenses and by visits to properties he owns [1] [2]. Direct, apples-to-apples comparisons to Barack Obama or Joe Biden are not available in these reports because they lack comparable, consolidated travel-cost tallies for those presidents; existing coverage notes that Obama’s golf trips were often local and involved less plane travel, while the Biden-era accounting is not directly reported in the data provided [3] [2].
1. The bombshell numbers: how much has Trump’s golf travel cost taxpayers?
The most prominent claim is a headline figure of $151.5 million tied to Trump’s time on a single course across his presidency, a total that the reporting traces to a synthesis of a 2019 Government Accountability Office (GAO) study and later calculations showing daily costs sometimes over $1.4 million when factoring in Air Force One, Secret Service, and other federal resources [2]. Other recent tallies cited in the same coverage assert that in a later stretch Trump incurred more than $18 million on golf trips within a short window and that some single visits to Palm Beach cost roughly $1 million each in federal outlays, while local law-enforcement overtime for security has been reported at $240,000 per day, producing multi‑million-dollar county bills [1] [3]. These figures emphasize high per-trip and per-day security and transport costs as the primary drivers rather than itemized hotel or green‑fee bills [2] [3].
2. What the reports actually measure and what they omit—methodology matters
The estimates combine different data streams—GAO audits of presidential travel, media calculations of per‑day federal resource use, and local overtime invoices—producing headline totals that vary with methodological choices about which costs to include [2]. The $151.5 million figure is based on extrapolating GAO daily-cost estimates to days spent at a specific course, while other totals, like the $18 million short‑term figure, appear as narrower accounting snapshots covering discrete timeframes [2] [1]. Crucially, these analyses do not uniformly include or exclude state and local security overtime, lodging paid to properties owned by the president, or the amortized costs of military airlift—differences that explain wide variance in totals and complicate direct comparisons to other administrations [2] [3].
3. Comparing Trump to Obama and Biden: limited apples-to-oranges comparisons
The reporting explicitly notes there is no direct, consolidated data in these sources that tallies golf-related travel costs for Barack Obama or Joe Biden in the same manner used for Trump, making precise comparisons impossible from the presented material [2] [1]. Journalistic context in one piece observes that Obama’s golf outings were often local and did not require plane travel, implying lower transport and security line items compared with Trump’s frequent out‑of‑state trips to privately owned resorts, but it stops short of providing dollar-for-dollar comparisons for Obama or Biden [3]. The absence of standardized, cross‑administration accounting in these reports means statements that one president “spent more” rely on differing methodologies and therefore should be read with caution [2].
4. The conflict-of-interest and local-cost angle reporters emphasize
Reporting highlights a distinct issue with Trump: many of his golf and resort visits were to properties he owns, raising concerns that federal and local security and lodging expenses flow to those properties, creating potential self‑enrichment dynamics not present when presidents stay at unaffiliated hotels [3] [2]. Local governments, such as Palm Beach County, have approved tens of millions in overtime and security funding tied to visits, with specific daily overtime figures cited that amplify the local taxpayer burden [3]. These angle-specific costs—county overtime, Secret Service accommodations at private venues, and the optics of public funds benefiting a president’s businesses—are central to the critical framing of the reported totals [3].
5. Bottom line: strong claims, patchy comparability, and open data needs
The published totals in these accounts present robust claims about high taxpayer costs tied to Trump’s golf travel, supported by GAO-derived daily-cost frameworks and county billing data, but the reports also reveal substantial methodological variability and no standardized cross‑adminstration dataset to compare presidents directly [2] [3] [1]. To move from contested headlines to conclusive comparisons requires a consistent accounting framework that specifies included cost categories (federal transport, Secret Service, military support, local overtime, lodging) and applies it across administrations. Without that, the existing evidence shows Trump’s golf travel incurred high federal and local costs, particularly due to travel and security and amplified by visits to properties he owns, while concrete numerical comparisons to Obama or Biden remain unresolved in these sources [2] [3] [1].