Get over it, all of you who took to the streets over the weekend full of anger and anxiety and couldn’t believe Donald Trump simultaneously took to the golf course full of sheer obliviousness.
The president of the United States’ biggest weekend anxiety was sinking a six-foot putt — and yet, some of us are still surprised at his callousness and spit-in-the-eye indifference toward millions of Americans?
As Jews like to say during the upcoming Passover season, “How is this [weekend] different from all others?”
It ain’t, not with our golfing-est president.
The weekend of national protests opened around here with Martin O’Malley, the former mayor, governor and Social Security chief, getting himself into the present political moment.
Standing outside his old agency’s headquarters in Woodlawn, he led hundreds protesting threatened cuts to Social Security, the life-saving fund to which millions of us have contributed pieces of our paychecks over our working lifetimes.
This should be O’Malley’s hour. Few in government know the details of Social Security the way he does. Few can defend it the way he can. This should be his time for standing up to the likes of the bullies Trump and Elon Musk. And maybe it will be.
But O’Malley’s weekend moment was just the start, as millions of Americans around the country gathered in all 50 states and D.C. to protest the cruelty and the mindlessness of the Trump-Musk actions.
And Trump’s response?
He goes golfing down in Florida.
Published reports say he’s done this every weekend since he returned to office in January. Huffington Post says he spent $10.7 million golfing — in his first month. He’s on a pace to cost taxpayers more than $100 million — in 2025 alone.
All of which mirrors the numbers from his first term in office. He’s also continued the practice of billing the Secret Service – whose agents are there to protect him – when Trump decides to stay at one of his own properties.
He’s run up the bill for taxpayers by needless millions of dollars. Yet, in their quest to uncover “waste” and “fraud,” such Trumpian waste and fraud never seem to occur to Trump and Musk as they go around cutting livelihoods for thousands of citizens.
Doesn’t this president, who values nothing more than TV optics, understand the ‘let-‘em-eat-cake’ look of Trump at play while voters fear for their future?
Americans have always had mixed feelings about presidents and their leisure time. Even in the midst of his great post-war popularity, Dwight Eisenhower was mocked for the amount of time he spent on golfing.
The political satirist Mort Sahl took note of this back when America was beginning to deal with public school segregation. When it was suggested that Eisenhower hold hands with a little girl trying to integrate a public school in Little Rock, Arkansas, Sahl said Ike turned down the idea because “he couldn’t decide whether to use an overlapping grip.”
Any other comparisons between Trump and Eisenhower are completely unfair. Ike led Allied troops to victory in World War II. Trump bluffed his way out of war with imaginary bone spurs.
Eisenhower tried to downplay his golfing. Trump, in the same week millions protest his policies, and the stock market tanks, and fear and anger cover the land, brags about his latest golf scores.
Get over it, all of you who expect empathy from this guy. He has none. And he isn’t embarrassed to be caught playing while his countrymen burn. He’s above it all, and he doesn’t care if we’re still expecting something more heartfelt to come along.
It won’t, not from this guy.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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