

Do you know how much Donald Trump‘s love for golf is worth? While that seems like an absurd question, the answer might particularly interest you. $71 Million. And that’s simply on golf trips. While his supporters might counter that with Trump’s quirky lifestyle—the construction of a million-dollar ballroom in the White House is one such example—this spending becomes an actual issue when you realize it’s your taxpaying money.
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The number comes from an analysis done by HuffPost in late November last year. If this rate continues, insiders claim that the final bill for his second term would make his controversial first-term bill look laughable. To put it bluntly: Donald Trump is on pace to spend more taxpayers’ money on golf than any modern US president—by a wide margin.
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The actual figures are jaw-dropping
By the looks of it, Donald Trump might be on the track to rack up around $300 M in golf-related expenses over the entire course of his second term. And if you remember his first-term estimates: $151.5, you’d realize that the new bill is double.
The website DidTrumpGolfToday.com (yes, such a website exists), which tracks the president’s golf-related movement using the official schedule and other activities, gives a clearer and starker picture. Since returning to the Oval Office, Trump has spent 90 days at golf courses. That amounts to 25.2% of his presidency so far. The site also provides an estimated cost of those trips, and it comes somewhere around $126 M. That’s already far above HuffPost‘s year-end estimate.
🚨BREAKING: After a LONG week of WINNING, President Trump got a round of Golf in at Trump National Golf Club Washington D.C.
WELL DESERVED MR. PRESIDENT 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/IE0PPNKAhN
— The Patriot Oasis™ (@ThePatriotOasis) June 28, 2025
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If you are wondering how such figures appear, then it’s not guesswork. Both HuffPost and DidTrumpGolfToday.com rely on cost benchmarks established by a 2019 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. This is the same report that examined his first four trips to Mar-a-Lago during his first term. GAO found that each trip cost the taxpayers around $3.3M based on 2017 dollars. The true cost today is almost certainly higher.
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Where does this money go?
The bulk of the expense is incurred on transportation and security. Each Florida golf weekend requires Air Force One flights. Those have a rough cost of $273k per hour. Then there is the entire cost of cadre, guns, aviation units, and whatnot.
Trips to Trump National Bedminster in New Jersey are also not cheap. Per visit costs an average of $1.1M. And if there’s an international excursion, like that to his Scottish property, the estimates are somewhere around $10 M for a single trip.
What actually makes this second-term spending particularly controversial is when you compare it to other presidents.
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Barack Obama also golfed frequently during his tenure. Over the eight years of his presidency, he played 333 rounds. But his total golf-related estimates are only around $85-90 million, as per reports. Across both terms.
His trick was teeing off near military courses, which helped in keeping the travel and security costs lower and contained. Trump, by contrast, almost always plays at his own resorts, which are located far off. That drastically increases the price tag.
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The renewed criticism of Donald Trump
Even his own conservative people frown upon this extravagant cost. Republican strategist Rick Wilson called this entire ordeal “corrupt, endemic, and ludicrous.”
“It’s one more example of Trump defining the presidency down. Way, way down,” he said.
Critics say that the issue is not the president playing golf, but the optics of the public’s money being used for his personal leisure activities. Then there is also a transparency problem. There is no official, up-to-date government accounting of Trump’s golf-related costs. HuffPost and DidTrumpGolfToday.com are independent trackers.
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In all practicality, a president golfing is not scandalous. But when it amounts to hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars, the questions will likely erupt.
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