President Donald Trump said years ago that he did not understand vacationers, and promised that if he came to power he would hardly spend time at leisure, but today he left Washington for a two-week break in which, according to the White House, working.
The president took off today for his golf club in the small town of Bedminster, New Jersey, where he plans to stay until 20 August.
Those 17 days are almost twice as much as those taken by former President Barack Obama in the first summer he took office in 2009 and will mark the longest period that Trump has been away from the White House since he came to power in January .
Although criticizing the president for taking a break is a classic ritual for the opposing turn in the United States, what has received in this case Trump are accusations of hypocrisy, for engaging in a practice he scorned for years.
“If you do not enjoy your job, you’re in the wrong job,” he wrote in his 2004 book “Trump: Think Like a Millionaire.”
In an interview in July 2015, Trump said that if he won the presidential election, “he would almost never leave the White House because there is a lot of work to be done.”
“It would not be a president to take a vacation,” he said then; And after being elected in November 2016, he promised that he would not be “very fond of” at leisure.
In recent years, Trump’s Twitter account was on when Obama took a few days off or played golf – a sport he now practices – and in 2011 questioned the “work ethic” of the former president for his decision to Spending ten days vacationing on an island in Massachusetts.
Trump has not spoken publicly about his decision to go on vacation now, but his escape coincides with complex renovations to the White House’s antiquated heating and air conditioning system, a task that will force those working the west wing to Move temporarily to a nearby building.
“The president will continue to work for the next two weeks,” Deputy White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters told reporters on Thursday.
“Replacing the ventilation system means the west wing will be out of air for the next two weeks, so the staff and president are leaving,” Walters said, citing an “urgent need” to repair the mechanisms installed Almost three decades ago.
But the spokeswoman described the trip to New Jersey as a “work vacation,” the same term most presidents have used to describe their breakaways from Washington for more than a century.
The first to use that phrase was Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1902 took a train to his residence in Long Island (New York) accompanied by several advisers and a retinue of journalists.
“Until then, when Congress was in recess, presidents felt they did not have much to do, but Roosevelt took with him many of the functions of the Presidency,” Efe, the author of the book “From Mount Vernon to Crawford,” told Efe. The history of presidential holidays, Kenneth Walsh.
Like Trump, Roosevelt was trying to escape the noise of the hammers. In the summer, work had begun to build what is now the west wing, an extension of the presidential residence where, until then, They had mixed with the private quarters of his family.
That historic fluke has not stopped criticism of Trump for choosing his golf club, a luxury resort for commercial purposes, rather than, for example, the presidential residence of Camp David, Maryland, built precisely so that leaders could move away From Washington and rest.
“This is not a vacation, it’s a marketing strategy” to promote their golf club, wrote the ex-director of the Office of Ethics in Government Walter Shaub in his Twitter account.
