Fact check: Did Obama or Bush have higher golf expenses than Trump?

1. What advocates and critics are actually claiming about who spent more on golf — the headline fight

Reporting published in 2025 has produced major claims that Trump’s golf and leisure travel produced taxpayer bills substantially larger than those under Obama or Bush, with aggregate figures cited in the tens or hundreds of millions and frequent visits to his own properties highlighted as a driver ^{[1] [5]}. Other pieces emphasize isolated high-cost episodes — for example, a single weekend in Scotland — to illustrate the per-trip burden on public coffers ^[4]. These accounts assert both elevated frequency of golf-related travel and unusual vendor relationships compared with past administrations ^{[2] [6]}.

2. How recent tallies quantify Trump’s golf and travel costs — the big numbers reporters use

Multiple 2025 reports give headline totals such as roughly $144 million for golf and leisure travel in his presidency and an additional estimated $155 million in projected second-term costs, with individual investigations citing more than 280 golf-course visits and tens of millions already billed in his current term ^{[1] [5]}. Journalists also point to specific mechanisms inflating costs: Secret Service and other federal support repeatedly billed or paid Trump-owned properties for lodging, transport staging, and on-site services, multiplying per-trip costs beyond standard White House travel logistics ^{[2] [6]}.

3. What the record says about Obama and Bush — an absence of equal accounting, not evidence of parity

The sources provided do not offer a modern, consolidated accounting for Obama or George W. Bush that matches the scrutiny applied to Trump, and several pieces explicitly note the lack of direct comparisons in their reporting ^{[3] [4]}. That absence means existing claims that Trump “exceeded Obama and Bush” rely partly on Trump-specific totals rather than direct cross-presidential audits. Past administrations did incur significant weekend and golf-related security and travel expenses, but the evidentiary basis to definitively rank totals across presidencies is not presented in these reports ^[3].

4. Timeline and data gaps that change the math — why totals diverge by source

Published figures vary because outlets use different timeframes, counting conventions, and data sources: some aggregate known payments for Secret Service, ranges of logistics spending, and support agency overtime; others extrapolate per-trip averages to estimate a presidency-long total ^{[2] [1]}. Several investigations rely on leaked or FOIA-obtained invoices and public budget lines, which produce inconsistent coverage of local costs, allied agency spending, and international government expenses, yielding widely differing dollar totals and complicating direct comparison with earlier presidents ^{[4] [1]}.

5. Methodological caveats reporters flag — what to watch for in any comparison

Analysts warn that counting practices matter: whether one includes local police overtime, host-country costs, State Department support, advance teams, and the value of Secret Service diverted from other duties changes totals materially, and older administrations were often calculated with different standards and less public tracing to private properties ^{[3] [6]}. The fiscal picture also depends on whether one treats payments to a president’s business as taxpayer support that “enriches” the president, a legal and ethical frame that affects interpretations but not the raw ledger equivalently across administrations ^{[2] [5]}.

6. Conflict-of-interest concerns and the angle of self-enrichment — reporters’ focal point

A recurring theme in the 2025 reporting is the potential self-enrichment problem when Secret Service and government agencies pay or use services at Trump-owned locations, which one set of analyses ties to higher per-trip costs and ethical questions absent in prior presidencies ^{[2] [5]}. Critics argue that routing federal spending to private properties creates an incentive dynamic that can increase taxpayer bills; proponents of the president might counter that the government must secure any site visited and costs reflect security realities. The sources document both the payments and the resulting scrutiny ^{[5] [6]}.

7. International episodes and local government burdens — Scotland and the UK’s tallies

Reporting from late 2025 points to substantial overseas operational costs tied to Trump’s visits, with Scottish and UK agencies estimating tens of millions of pounds in response costs for specific visits, signaling that non‑US governments also bore sizable burdens and that international tallies compound the overall fiscal story ^[7]. These accounts underscore that comparisons limited to U.S. federal spending undercount the broader public cost footprint associated with frequent high-profile leisure travel by a sitting president who visits private properties abroad ^{[7] [4]}.

8. Bottom line: stronger evidence that Trump’s golf-related costs were higher, but the ranking lacks perfect comparability

Taken together, the reporting indicates strong evidence that Trump’s golf and related travel costs were higher in absolute terms than what is widely reported for Obama or Bush, driven by high frequency, payments to Trump properties, and detailed 2025 accounting efforts that produce large totals ^{[1] [2]}. Yet the absence of matched, methodologically consistent data across administrations means a definitive, apples-to-apples ranking remains unsettled; the key unanswered needs are standardized audit methods, full FOIA disclosures across years, and comparable inclusion rules for security and local costs ^{[3] [4]}.