For a president of the United States, Donald Trump remains as someone with very twisted priorities. He routinely ignores issues of national and global importance, opting to instead focus on pushing his own personal agenda.
Thanks to that backdrop, him having taken to Twitter on Saturday to praise the record of a particular golfer is well poised to strike a nerve with people. It’s not as though his support is a well timed foray into social activities; instead, he obsesses over items like golf, having famously spent a massive chunk of his initial time in office at a golf course branded with his own name. Meanwhile, the nation has continued to face issues driving people apart.
Early Saturday afternoon, he retweeted a message posted by the official Twitter account of the PGA Tour honoring the record of golfer Byron Nelson and added his own comment.
He wrote:
‘Now this is a record that will never be broken!’
Now this is a record that will never be broken! https://t.co/rtpLfvsBU5
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 2, 2018
Again, this post isn’t some harmless support from the president for a particular athlete. It didn’t appear in a vacuum and is instead emblematic of something much more serious. He has proven to be obsessed with golf to the point of finding it nothing to cost the nation millions of dollars while taking trips to his very own golf courses over and over again.
NBC reports him to have spent just under one-fourth of his time in office at a Trump-branded golf property at this point; overall, according to the same report, he has spent just under one-third of his time in office at a Trump-branded property, including those times he was not on the golf course.
The argument has been used other times before at this point, but if other presidents attempted to maintain such a strong connection to the private sector, there’s little doubt that Republicans would be up in arms over ethical concerns since it’s not as though the president has ceded all part in his properties. Instead, he just gave executive control of them to his sons.
Thus, at present, whenever the president goes to one of his properties, he turns the United States government into an accessory to be touted in some demented real life ad for his company. At the same time, he and his company make money off the whole thing through such means as the government paying for accommodations to follow the president around.
What makes the whole set-up even more ironic is that the president routinely attempts to cast himself as fiscally conservative. Just this Saturday he again took to Twitter to complain about the cost of the Russia investigation while the facts of the millions he’s cost the government via golfing remain in place.
His concern, of course, with the Russia investigation is less about its cost and more about his very existence. That finding can be gathered from examining his attitudes towards golf, an attitude he proudly touted yet again on Twitter this Saturday.
Check out Twitter’s response below.
Featured Image via Cheriss May/ NurPhoto via Getty Images
