The fairway to doomsday...
Before calling the White House home, Donald Trump used to wonder why any president would ever leave.
"If you're in the White House, who wants to take a vacation?" he once asked a campaign crowd in Spencer, Iowa. Noting the limited time a president has there, he criticized President Obama for vacationing "when there's so much work to be done."
"You're in the White House," he said. "What's better than the White House? Why these vacations?"
But since his January inauguration, President Trump has spent seven of 13 weekends at his Palm Beach, Florida estate. According to NBC News' estimates by Sunday Trump will have spent 28 percent of his term traveling to or staying at Mar-a-Lago. Trump hosted his second world leader at the "winter White House" last weekend, with Chinese President Xi Jinping joining Trump for meetings Thursday and Friday. Trump stayed the rest of the weekend, frequenting his nearby golf club on both days.
It's not just a question of travel time, but of ethics and cost efficiency, according to watchdog groups and ethics experts.
While presidents have always traveled on the taxpayer's dollar — the Obamas were partial to Hawaii and Martha's Vineyard while President George W. Bush frequented his Crawford, Texas ranch — Trump's travel is "unprecedented," one expert says, because he's repeatedly visiting his own privately owned commercial property at Mar-a-Lago.
"It's just another example of his consistent efforts to exploit public office for private gain," ethics expert Steve Schooner told NBC News. "He's using his official office and the fact that people have to travel with him, meet him, and follow him to promote his commercial enterprise, in this case his privately owned club."
"I can't think of anything like this that we've seen at anytime in the modern era," the George Washington Law School professor told NBC News. The Mar-a-Lago property is still owned by Trump, who placed his holdings in a trust overseen by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg before assuming office, prompting Schooner to lament that the president "should have divested from his properties to begin with."
Since Trump became president the cost of membership at Mar-a-Lago has doubled, with guests now paying $200,000 just to join.