How many times has Trump gone on vacation or played golf since his second term?
Executive summary
Available sources report counts and estimates but disagree on definitions. CREW says Trump made 62 visits to his golf courses in the first six months of his second term and 99 visits to his properties overall [1] [2]. HuffPost-based reporting and aggregators count roughly 16 Mar‑a‑Lago trips and other course visits in 2025, producing taxpayer-cost estimates of about $70–71 million so far and projecting roughly $300 million over four years if the pace continues [3] [4] [5] [6].
1. What reporters mean by “vacation” or “golf” matters
News outlets and watchdogs use different measures: CREW tracks “visits to his golf courses” and to “properties” (62 golf‑course visits; 99 property visits in six months), while HuffPost and those who cite it count discrete trips to Mar‑a‑Lago, Bedminster and other clubs and then multiply by an estimated per‑trip taxpayer cost [1] [2] [3]. DidTrumpGolfToday and TrumpGolfTrack are independent trackers that log days spent golfing but use their own inclusion rules [7] [8]. These definitional differences explain the wide variation in reported totals [7] [8] [1].
2. The most frequently cited raw counts
CREW’s audit is the clearest public count in available sources: 62 visits to Trump golf courses in the first six months of his second term and 99 visits to Trump‑owned properties in that period [1] [2]. Other media pieces cite 16 Mar‑a‑Lago trips and nine Bedminster visits in 2025 specifically; trackers disagree and produce higher cumulative tallies [3] [5] [9].
3. How the cost estimates are derived — and their limits
HuffPost’s widely cited dollar figures are based on applying per‑trip costs from a 2019 Government Accountability Office (GAO) analysis of four 2017 trips to Trump’s clubs to the 2025 trip count. That yields roughly $3.4 million per country‑club trip and a headline figure near $70–71 million for 2025 so far, with a projection toward $300 million over four years if current patterns persist [3] [4] [5] [6]. But Snopes notes the GAO says it has no active work on 2025 trips, and that the HuffPost method extrapolates older GAO snapshots rather than newly audited figures — a limitation HuffPost itself acknowledges in methodology [10] [3].
4. Disagreements in the record and why they matter
Different outlets produce different totals because they rely on distinct trackers (DidTrumpGolfToday, TrumpGolfTrack), watchdog counts (CREW), or cost‑model extrapolations (HuffPost). For example, DidTrumpGolfToday’s cumulative spending estimate cited by some outlets is materially higher than HuffPost’s $70.8M figure; PennLive and others repeat both numbers and note the discrepancy [7] [5] [4]. The disagreement matters for public debate: whether coverage focuses on number of leisure days, visits to properties that generate private profit, or taxpayer security/travel costs leads to different political implications [2] [3].
5. What watchdogs and critics emphasize
CREW frames these visits as evidence of “term‑2 corruption,” stressing that visiting and routing business to properties the president owns creates an appearance of self‑enrichment and influence, and points to increased frequency versus the prior term (62 golf‑course visits vs. 42 last term in the comparable period) [1] [2]. Democratic groups and some outlets highlight the taxpayer bill and the optics of playing at his own clubs, citing both trip counts and the HuffPost cost projections [11] [12] [3].
6. What defenders and trackers sometimes point to
Some trackers and pro‑Trump or neutral outlets emphasize that not all time at a property is “vacation” and that presidents have historically spent time away from the White House; cost comparisons to prior presidents are used to contextualize the figures [9] [12]. Available sources do not include direct White House accounting that reconciles these counts with official travel‑cost records; GAO has not published a 2025 audit of these trips, per a GAO spokesperson cited by Snopes [10].
7. Bottom line for readers
If your question is “how many times” in an absolute, single‑number sense, available reputable counts point to dozens of golf‑course visits early in the second term — CREW: 62 in six months — and multiple Mar‑a‑Lago and Bedminster trips cataloged by media trackers [1] [2] [3]. If your question is about taxpayer cost, the most widely circulated estimate extrapolating GAO figures is roughly $70–71M so far in 2025 with projections to ~$300M over four years if patterns continue — but that estimate depends on applying past GAO per‑trip costs to current trips, a method acknowledged as an approximation and not validated by a new GAO audit [3] [10].
Limitations: available sources do not provide a single, official tally or a recent GAO audit covering 2025 trips; different trackers and watchdogs use different definitions and methods, producing materially different totals [7] [8] [10].