We’re putting tariffs on our closest trading partners. Now it’s a few hours later, so we’re taking them off. Ope, back on again. Now we’re tariffing everyone, including penguins. F*ck you, penguins.
We flipped on our ally in the war in Ukraine. We are also trying to take Greenland from a different ally. We’re bombing people in Yemen, though not without first discussing specific details of the attack in advance on an unsecure commercial messaging platform with a journalist in the chat. Maybe we will go to war with Iran. Why not?
Let’s cut down as many trees as possible in our national forests. Children are dying of measles: send the guy who almost single-handedly caused measles to come back. While we’re at it, cut a bunch of disease research.
We’re firing tens of thousands of federal workers and making sure the rest of them are miserable. Doesn’t it seem like an awful lot of aircraft are crashing lately? Never mind that, we have to focus on getting rid of more of the people who collect the money, which will, trust us, somehow save money.
Well, it seems we deported someone with no criminal record who was legally in the United States to a foreign torture prison because we didn’t give him any of the due process he was owed under the Constitution. Refusing to return him, is, of course, the hill we are going to die on in defiance of the courts. Don’t worry, we’re lying through our teeth about it.
What treachery that these law firms dare to *gasp* advocate on behalf of the clients who came to them for legal assistance. They must be punished. We shall extort at least $1 billion in free legal services from the cowardly among them through the use of blatantly unconstitutional executive orders.
How about shower heads? Naturally, the president of the United States needs to protect our right to waste as much hot water as we want.
I suppose that will about do. This is all real sh*t Donald Trump has done, either directly or indirectly, during the first three months of his second term, allegedly on behalf of the American people. I have no compunction about calling it sh*t, because that’s what it is: sh*t. Stupid, cowardly, dangerous, self-serving, counterproductive, ridiculous: yes, we have on our hands a big, steaming pile of the policy and leadership equivalent of noxious excrement.
Although memories are short in the 2020s, some of you will recall the feeling from the first Trump administration where you wake up every morning under a pall of low-grade dread with the question, “What next?” on your lips. It’s even worse this time around.
Have you noticed, however, that the latest crazy nonsense from the Trump administration rarely surfaces on the weekend? Nothing inherent to the office of the presidency prevents a president from making announcements or implementing policy decisions on the weekend.
What does prevent it is the fact that this president has spent just about every weekend golfing. Even as he torches the economy, Trump has no compunction about squeezing in a quick 18 holes at one of his Florida golf courses. (He owns closer, cheaper courses, but since he’s not paying, why skimp?)
Trump’s golf trips are massively expensive for the U.S. taxpayer. A typical Trump golf weekend costs taxpayers about $3.4 million.
Right now, since Trump is still finding plenty of time to destroy America’s standing in the world between golf outings, that is just money down the tubes. If he could somehow be persuaded to golf full-time, though, so as to stop making decisions entirely, $3.4 million in return for every couple days free of Trump brand chaos would be a bargain for taxpayers.
Trump has wiped out $11 billion from the value of U.S. stocks since his inauguration and imposed “hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes on Americans” through his tariffs, as conservative commentator Ben Shapiro put it. That is to say nothing of the value of the intangibles like respect for and trust in the United States that Trump has set alight. At $1.7 million a day for golf, if we were to send Trump golfing every day for the full four years of his presidential term, that would ring up at about $2.48 billion -– a bargain any way you want to measure it if it would successfully stop him from doing anything else as president.
While not every Trump policy is bad, most have been disasters. Even the comparatively good decisions are implemented with all the care and precision of a sixth grader cobbling together his project the night before the science fair. If only Trump would golf even more instead of trying to run the country in between golf outings, taxpayers could happily foot the bill. Until that happens, better get used to waking up under that blanket of dread.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
The post The Taxpayer Millions Trump Spends Golfing? Worth It To Distract Him From Crazy Sh*t He’d Otherwise Be Doing. appeared first on Above the Law.
We’re putting tariffs on our closest trading partners. Now it’s a few hours later, so we’re taking them off. Ope, back on again. Now we’re tariffing everyone, including penguins. F*ck you, penguins.
We flipped on our ally in the war in Ukraine. We are also trying to take Greenland from a different ally. We’re bombing people in Yemen, though not without first discussing specific details of the attack in advance on an unsecure commercial messaging platform with a journalist in the chat. Maybe we will go to war with Iran. Why not?
Let’s cut down as many trees as possible in our national forests. Children are dying of measles: send the guy who almost single-handedly caused measles to come back. While we’re at it, cut a bunch of disease research.
We’re firing tens of thousands of federal workers and making sure the rest of them are miserable. Doesn’t it seem like an awful lot of aircraft are crashing lately? Never mind that, we have to focus on getting rid of more of the people who collect the money, which will, trust us, somehow save money.
Well, it seems we deported someone with no criminal record who was legally in the United States to a foreign torture prison because we didn’t give him any of the due process he was owed under the Constitution. Refusing to return him, is, of course, the hill we are going to die on in defiance of the courts. Don’t worry, we’re lying through our teeth about it.
What treachery that these law firms dare to *gasp* advocate on behalf of the clients who came to them for legal assistance. They must be punished. We shall extort at least $1 billion in free legal services from the cowardly among them through the use of blatantly unconstitutional executive orders.
How about shower heads? Naturally, the president of the United States needs to protect our right to waste as much hot water as we want.
I suppose that will about do. This is all real sh*t Donald Trump has done, either directly or indirectly, during the first three months of his second term, allegedly on behalf of the American people. I have no compunction about calling it sh*t, because that’s what it is: sh*t. Stupid, cowardly, dangerous, self-serving, counterproductive, ridiculous: yes, we have on our hands a big, steaming pile of the policy and leadership equivalent of noxious excrement.
Although memories are short in the 2020s, some of you will recall the feeling from the first Trump administration where you wake up every morning under a pall of low-grade dread with the question, “What next?” on your lips. It’s even worse this time around.
Have you noticed, however, that the latest crazy nonsense from the Trump administration rarely surfaces on the weekend? Nothing inherent to the office of the presidency prevents a president from making announcements or implementing policy decisions on the weekend.
What does prevent it is the fact that this president has spent just about every weekend golfing. Even as he torches the economy, Trump has no compunction about squeezing in a quick 18 holes at one of his Florida golf courses. (He owns closer, cheaper courses, but since he’s not paying, why skimp?)
Trump’s golf trips are massively expensive for the U.S. taxpayer. A typical Trump golf weekend costs taxpayers about $3.4 million.
Right now, since Trump is still finding plenty of time to destroy America’s standing in the world between golf outings, that is just money down the tubes. If he could somehow be persuaded to golf full-time, though, so as to stop making decisions entirely, $3.4 million in return for every couple days free of Trump brand chaos would be a bargain for taxpayers.
Trump has wiped out $11 billion from the value of U.S. stocks since his inauguration and imposed “hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes on Americans” through his tariffs, as conservative commentator Ben Shapiro put it. That is to say nothing of the value of the intangibles like respect for and trust in the United States that Trump has set alight. At $1.7 million a day for golf, if we were to send Trump golfing every day for the full four years of his presidential term, that would ring up at about $2.48 billion -– a bargain any way you want to measure it if it would successfully stop him from doing anything else as president.
While not every Trump policy is bad, most have been disasters. Even the comparatively good decisions are implemented with all the care and precision of a sixth grader cobbling together his project the night before the science fair. If only Trump would golf even more instead of trying to run the country in between golf outings, taxpayers could happily foot the bill. Until that happens, better get used to waking up under that blanket of dread.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].
