My esteemed colleague Tom Rogan writes that “liberals are wrong to complain about President Trump’s golfing costs.” I guess that gets me off the hook. As a conservative, I hope other conservatives join me in complaining about Trump’s golf costs.

And I make the same complaint as an avid golfer.

The problem isn’t that Trump likes golf, or that he finds at least some time to play it. Rogan is right that presidents need relief from the stresses of the job, and golf is a salutary diversion. And the problem isn’t that presidential golf costs more than golf by anybody else, because of course security and other considerations make it so by necessity. Everything done by the president costs more than it would cost anyone else. That’s just reality.

Where I disagree is with this statement of Rogan’s: “We should defer to the president's preference of vacation location, regardless of distance or costs applied.”

No. The president is not a potentate. The presidency does not carry with it the right to self-absorbed excess. If any other public official — the speaker of the House, for example, or the chief justice of the United States — were billing taxpayers to pay for him to fly across the country, frequently, on a whim, to play golf at some exotic locale, there would be official investigations into potentially criminal misuse of government funds.

Sure, a successful man still working in his 70s might expect three or four weeks of vacation a year. And in a president’s case, every vacation is in a sense a “working vacation,” or at least an “on call” vacation. But the presidency is not Club Med. A president is supposed to be the ultimate public servant. He shouldn’t be playing golf anywhere 175 times in just 28 months, much less playing wherever he has an itch to tee it up.

Specifically because it costs taxpayers huge sums every time the president plays golf, a president should try to restrain himself at least enough to usually play within reasonable, less expensive travel distance. (It’s even worse when the president’s own resorts profit tremendously from such visits, as Trump resorts apparently have done 174 of the 175 times he has played, but that’s a separate issue.) Some of us thought former President Barack Obama was too self-indulgent in playing golf so often, but even Obama’s golf costs at this point in his presidency, $30 million, were well less than a third of Trump’s $102 million.

Self-indulgent profligacy with the public fisc is always, and everywhere, an unethical practice. Such self-indulgence by someone who is supposed to be the nation’s 'First Servant' is particularly galling.

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