Arguably, Donald Trump puts in less time on the job than any president since Woodrow Wilson after the stroke that left his wife Edith in charge for his final year and a half in office. Is Trump’s perfunctory attention to the details of the job and preference for self-agrandizement a shame and a disgrace, an exploitation of the American taxpayer or a silver lining? One can argue it either way.
The facts are undisputed. We know that 60% of Trump’s working days are spent on so-called “executive time.” That was chief-of-staff John Kelly’s euphemism for personal time spent by a president fooling around in the White House residence on private pursuits rather than in the office attending to public business.
We know from records Kelly kept that Trump was often up by six tweeting up a storm and watching “Fox and Friends.” Yet he rarely arrived at work until 11, just in time for lunch. Some of those six hours may have been devoted to the tanning bed and spraying in place the hairstyle concocted to conceal his baldness. But he is also known to spend a lot of time in the residence rolling through phone calls with old cronies, business moguls, golf buddies, hangers-on, co-conspirators and friendly media toadies.
Trump also avoids the office by being out of Washington more often than most previous presidents. He has golfed on nearly one-third of his days in office. A tally of those playing with the president show them to have been 33% athletes, 15% business executives, 8% politicians, 5% lawyers and the rest unidentified.
Trump has also spent 28% of his days in office, over fifty total trips, at one or another of his properties — chiefly Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster. The travel to those two resorts alone has cost taxpayers over $100 million, not including expenses for Secret Service and other reimbursements.
The Washington Post has revealed that in eight years Barack Obama’s travel cost $96 million. In one month, Trump’s travel bill was 13.6 million. Each trip to Mar-a-Lago has been estimated to cost $3.5 million. Trump-related Secret Service expenses include $550 million for golf carts to chase him around various courses, and protection for “business” travel for Trump’s sons and daughter.
Congress has sought a full accounting from the Secret Service, but this has been blocked by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin until after the November election. This a transparent bid to keep the embarrassing facts from the voters, aka taxpayers. Thus, the full cost of maintaining Trump’s lifestyle in unknown. We do know that Trump not only gets ferried to his properties for free but gets to charge the government for any guests or executive branch staff that stay at his properties, and to profit from both the lodging and room service fees but also all the free advertising that accrues.
When Trump isn’t at his resorts, golfing, or spending executive time, he’s on the road performing his act at rallies that salve his ego and feed red meat to his base, also at taxpayer expense and unrelated to the work of governing.
Other presidents famously took home stacks of briefing books and government reports to study in the evenings. Trump does not, rather he tweets when he isn’t glued to Fox News or talking on the phone to employees of that unofficial State medium, especially Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs. They funnel him ideas for deregulating government, cutting taxes, and denying climate change that align with the desires of their boss, Rupert Murdock, the shadow president of the United States.
The naive might rejoice that a man whose program seems designed to vitiate American democracy, worsen climate change and inequality, enable corporate malfeasance, and endanger national security spends very little time on the job. How much worse might things be, one wonders, if Trump were a demon of energy and razor-sharp intellect as some chief executives have been —beavering away night and day on issues foreign and domestic, legislative and regulatory?
Celebration, however, would be premature. While Trump is jetting around the country golfing and performing, his appointees are busy vandalizing the government. Trump may appear to be an incompetent boob interested solely in savaging his political foes and putting on a clown show for the faithful, but he has turned over the government to people energetically making Steve Bannon’s dream come true — “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”
Early in 2017 when Bannon briefly had power, Prof. Ross K. Baker suggested that such an “abolition of the agencies is probably beyond Bannon’s power, but they can be crippled simply by failing to fill vacancies or drastically cutting budgets.” This has proven to be prescient.
Trump and his advisers and donors have chosen their toadies and despoilers well. Cabinet secretaries who oppose the work of their departments have been installed at HUD, Education, State, and Justice. Lobbyists and executives from the industries they are now meant to regulate have been brought in to rig the game at EPA, Consumer Protection, Agriculture, Interior, Defense and so on.
Regulation has been crippled, staff cut and acting department heads exempt from congressional vetting are in charge, but Ross failed to anticipate the other goal Trump would pursue successfully. Behind the populist smokescreen, Trump’s minions are working energetically to replace an administrative state with a crony capitalist state catering to the desires of the autocrat and to the benefit of his loyal oligarchs, acolytes, paymasters and favorites. This is not democracy; it is the swamp on steroids.