Friday, August 3, 2018

What did Donald Trump do today?

He began an indefinite vacation. 

Today was Trump's first full day on his latest vacation at his New Jersey golf club and resort, where he will be spending an as-yet unspecified length of time. The only clue as to the actual number of days or weeks that Trump will be away from his typical work habits is a routine filing with the Federal Aviation Administration that limits air traffic around Bedminster. At the moment, those restrictions are in place through August 13. 

The White House is describing this as a "working vacation," although that is also how staffers described last August's 17-day excursion, only to have Trump insist that he was not on vacation. This year, virtually all of the interruptions to his golf course time for the foreseeable future take the form of political campaign rallies, which his staff sometimes schedules for him as a form of therapy

The only work-related task that Trump has set for himself in the next ten days is to "decide" whether he will agree to a voluntary interview with DOJ special counsel Robert Mueller. Trump has occasionally insisted that he wants such a meeting, but the near-unanimous verdict from the legal community is that he cannot afford the legal jeopardy that such a meeting would put him in. That includes Trump's own lawyers and friends, who have openly said that if Trump agreed to be interviewed with Mueller, he would probably perjure himself.

Assuming Trump stays at Bedminster through August 13, he will then have spent 32% of his presidency at one or another of his own luxury resorts.

So what?

  • If you need to take every third day off from your extremely important full-time job, you probably aren't fit to do it.