Taxpayer bill for Trump's golf trips balloons to $71 million: report

According to a new report out from HuffPost, the bill for President Donald Trump's many golf trips continues to balloon bigger and bigger, potentially outstripping his first term by a wide margin.

According to the analysis done by HuffPost, Trump's various golf trips, including to his own Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, have racked up around $71 million since the start of his second term in January. Given the requirements for long-distance travel from Washington, D.C., including the need to move extensive presidential security and support systems with him, the cost of each of these trips to Mar-a-Lago is roughly $3.4 million. Trips to his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., cost about $1.1 million, while overseas visits, including the trip he made to his golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland, can cost close to $10 million.

Based on projections by HuffPost, Trump's golf trips will exceed $75 million in expenses if he makes just two more visits to Mar-a-Lago in December, an entirely possible figure given that he made four golf trips in November alone.

This total sum for the year would be significant in comparison to his first term. According to HuffPost, Trump's golf trips racked up a total cost of $151.5 million during the entirety of his first presidency. The outlet's projection for 2025 means that he would surpass half the total cost of his first four-year term in just one year. Based on the numbers for this year, the outlet also projected that Trump's golf habit could end up costing American taxpayers over $300 million over the course of his entire second term.

“I really wish I could tell you that it would make anyone in America change their mind about him, but the corruption is so baked in, so endemic, and so ludicrous that it feels like the collective reaction will be a shrug,” Rick Wilson, an outspoken Trump critic and longtime GOP consultant, told HuffPost. “It’s one more example of Trump defining the presidency down. Way, way down.”

HuffPost noted that its estimates are based on a 2019 Government Accountability Office report about Trump's Mar-a-Lago trips. The outlet suggested that the real costs of these excursions in his second term are likely much higher, due to certain expenses being impacted by inflation.