EDINBURGH – During sweaty summer months, Abraham Lincoln often decamped about 3 miles (5 kilometers) north of the White House to the Soldiers’ Home, a presidential retreat of cottages and parkland in what today is the Petworth section of northwest Washington.
Ulysses S. Grant sometimes summered at his family’s cottage in Long Branch, New Jersey, even occasionally driving teams of horses on the beach. Ronald Reagan once said he did “some of my best thinking” at his Rancho Del Cielo retreat outside Santa Barbara, California.
Donald Trump’s getaway is taking him considerably farther from the nation’s capital, to the coast of Scotland.
The White House isn’t calling Trump’s five-day, midsummer jaunt a vacation, but rather a working trip where the Republican president might hold a news conference and sit for interviews with U.S. and British media outlets. Trump was also talking trade in separate meetings with European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Trump is staying at his properties near Turnberry and Aberdeen, where his family owns two golf courses and is opening a third on Aug. 13. Trump played golf over the weekend at Turnberry and is helping cut the ribbon on the new course on Tuesday.
He’s not the first president to play in Scotland: Dwight D. Eisenhower played at Turnberry in 1959, more than a half century before Trump bought it, after meeting with French President Charles de Gaulle in Paris. But none of Trump’s predecessors has constructed a foreign itinerary around promoting vacation sites his family owns and is actively expanding.
It lays bare how Trump has leveraged his second term to pad his family’s profits in a variety of ways, including overseas development deals and promoting cryptocurrencies, despite growing questions about ethics concerns.
“You have to look at this as yet another attempt by Donald Trump to monetize his presidency,” said Leonard Steinhorn, who teaches political communication and courses on American culture and the modern presidency at American University. “In this case, using the trip as a PR opportunity to promote his golf courses.”
Presidents typically vacation in the US
Franklin D. Roosevelt went to the Bahamas, often for the excellent fishing, five times between 1933 and 1940. He visited Canada’s Campobello Island in New Brunswick, where he had vacationed as a child, in 1933, 1936 and 1939.
Reagan spent Easter 1982 on vacation in Barbados after meeting with Caribbean leaders and warning of a Marxist threat that could spread throughout the region from nearby Grenada.
Presidents also never fully go on vacation. They travel with a large entourage of aides, receive intelligence briefings, take calls and otherwise work away from Washington. Kicking back in the United States, though, has long been the norm.
Harry S. Truman helped make Key West, Florida, a tourist hot spot with his “Little White House” cottage there. Several presidents, including James Buchanan and Benjamin Harrison, visited the Victorian architecture in Cape May, New Jersey.
More recently, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama boosted tourism on Massachusetts’ Martha’s Vineyard, while Trump has buoyed Palm Beach, Florida, with frequent trips to his Mar-a-Lago estate. But any tourist lift Trump gets from his Scottish visit is likely to most benefit his family.
“Every president is forced to weigh politics versus fun on vacation,” said Jeffrey Engel, David Gergen Director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who added that Trump is “demonstrating his priorities.”
“When he thinks about how he wants to spend his free time, A., playing golf, B., visiting places where he has investments and C., enhancing those investments, that was not the priority for previous presidents, but it is his vacation time,” Engel said.
It’s even a departure from Trump’s first term, when he found ways to squeeze in visits to his properties while on trips more focused on work. Trump stopped at his resort in Hawaii to thank staff members after visiting the memorial site at Pearl Harbor and before embarking on an Asia trip in November 2017. He played golf at Turnberry in 2018 before meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Finland.
Trump once decried the idea of taking vacations as president.
“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, “Think Like a Billionaire.” During his presidential campaign in 2015, he pledged to “rarely leave the White House.”
Even as recently as a speech at a summit on artificial intelligence in Washington on Wednesday, Trump derided his predecessor for flying long distances for golf — something he’s now doing.
“They talked about the carbon footprint and then Obama hops onto a 747, Air Force One, and flies to Hawaii to play a round of golf and comes back,” he said.
Presidential vacations and any overseas trips were once taboo
Trump isn’t the first president not wanting to publicize taking time off.
George Washington was criticized for embarking on a New England tour to promote the presidency. Some took issue with his successor, John Adams, for leaving the then-capital of Philadelphia in 1797 for a long visit to his family’s farm in Quincy, Massachusetts. James Madison left Washington for months after the War of 1812.
Teddy Roosevelt helped pioneer the modern presidential vacation in 1902 by chartering a special train and directing key staffers to rent houses near Sagamore Hill, his home in Oyster Bay, New York, according to the White House Historical Association.
Four years later, Roosevelt upended tradition again, this time by becoming the first president to leave the country while in office. The New York Times noted that Roosevelt’s 30-day trip by yacht and battleship to tour construction of the Panama Canal “will violate the traditions of the United States for 117 years by taking its President outside the jurisdiction of the Government at Washington.”
In the decades since, where presidents opted to vacation, even outside the U.S., has become part of their political personas.
In addition to New Jersey, Grant relaxed on Martha’s Vineyard. Calvin Coolidge spent the 1928 Christmas holidays at Sapelo Island, Georgia. Lyndon B. Johnson had his “Texas White House,” a Hill Country ranch.
Eisenhower vacationed in Newport, Rhode Island. John F. Kennedy went to Palm Springs, California, and his family’s compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, among other places. Richard Nixon had the “Southern White House” on Key Biscayne, Florida, while Joe Biden traveled frequently to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, while also visiting Nantucket, Massachusetts, and St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
George H.W. Bush was a frequent visitor to his family’s property in Kennebunkport, Maine, and didn’t let the start of the Gulf War in 1991 detour him from a monthlong vacation there. His son, George W. Bush, opted for his ranch in Crawford, Texas, rather than a more posh destination.
Presidential visits help tourism in some places more than others, but Engel said that for some Americans, “if the president of the Untied States goes some place, you want to go to the same place.”
He noted that visitors emulating presidential vacations are out “to show that you’re either as cool as he or she, that you understand the same values as he or she or, heck, maybe you’ll bump into he or she.”
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