The president will spend 17 days at his private golf club in New Jersey despite being famously anti-vacation over the years in books and interviews

Donald Trump once questioned the wisdom of taking vacations. “What’s the point?” he asked.

But now the president is getting ready to join the annual August exodus from the city he calls “the swamp”. Trump is due on Friday to begin his first extended vacation from Washington since the inauguration: 17 days at his private golf club in central New Jersey.

Secret Service will deploy drones to watch Trump during golfing vacation Read more

The vacation could be driven in part by necessity. Everyone who works in the White House West Wing, including the Oval Office occupant himself, must clear out by the end of the week so that the government can replace a bulky, 27-year-old heating and cooling system.

The White House hasn’t been entertaining questions about the president’s August plans. Asked whether Trump would leave Washington this month, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Tuesday: “We’ll continue to keep you guys updated on his August schedule as those details are finalized.”

White House officials said this is a “working vacation”, and that Trump would not have time for a reading list, USA Today reported.

Trump and his supporters like to publicize his disdain for taking vacations, when the truth is that he takes them constantly.

“Don’t take vacations. What’s the point? If you’re not enjoying your work, you’re in the wrong job,” Trump wrote in his 2004 book, Trump: Think Like a Billionaire.

He told Larry King in an interview that year: “Most of the people I know that are successful really don’t take vacations. Their business is their vacation. I rarely leave. You know that.

“You and I are friends,” he said. “How often do you see me going away?”

Actually, Trump gets out of town quite often. So far, he has spent 13 of 28 weekends in office away from the White House, mostly at his properties in Palm Beach, Florida, or in Bedminster, New Jersey, according to an Associated Press count. The figures include a weekend during official travel overseas and Father’s Day weekend at Camp David, the government-owned presidential retreat in Maryland.

Contrast Trump’s frequent getaways with his criticism, before and during last year’s presidential campaign, of Barack Obama’s vacations and frequent golf outings.

“@BarackObama played golf yesterday. Now he heads to a 10 day vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. Nice work ethic,” Trump tweeted in August 2011.

Trump said last year that he wouldn’t have time for golf if he became president.

“I’m going to be working for you, I’m not going to have time to go play golf,” he told supporters in Virginia. But he plays golf whenever he’s at his clubs; sometimes it’s the full 18 holes, other times less than that. His staff rarely acknowledges that he plays, even when photos of him on the course pop up on social media.

Presidents have been escaping Washington’s summer heat and humidity ever since Thomas Jefferson looked out of the White House windows and watched as a white fog that was believed to be toxic rolled in. Harry Truman played poker on the porch in Key West, Florida. Ronald Reagan rode horses at his mountain ranch in California.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both spent August vacations on Martha’s Vineyard, the tiny Massachusetts island that serves as a summer playground for the rich and famous. George W Bush retreated to his secluded Crawford, Texas, ranch to clear brush and ride his mountain bike.

Besides the replacement of the West Wing’s heating and cooling system, repairs also are to be made to the steps on the South Portico, the side of the White House facing the National Mall.

Cosmetic upgrades to the West Wing, including interior painting, replacing carpeting and curtains and fixing water leaks in the press office ceiling, are also on the maintenance list. Work is expected to go on around the clock to complete the upgrades by 21 August.

Presidents travel with the equivalent of a mini White House made up of advisers, other aides and security. The work of being president continues, and they must be prepared to handle a crisis at all hours and from wherever they are.

But chronic stress affects the body’s ability to resist infection, maintain vital functions and avoid injuries, Susan Krauss Whitbourne, then a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, wrote in a 2010 paper on the website of Psychology Today subtitled “Why presidents (and all of us) need vacations”.

Stressed-out people are more likely to get sick, have accidents, sleep poorly, be more irritable and less fun to be around. Whitbourne wrote that vacations break the “stress cycle”.

“Perhaps it’s good that someone as important as our president is showing that he believes it’s beneficial to take a break from the office, get out and enjoy the outdoors in a little bit of a break in mindset and, we would hope, be able to go back to work refreshed and renewed and do a better job,” Whitbourne, who currently teaches at the university’s Boston campus, told the AP in a telephone interview. “I think that’s the theory of vacations.”

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