WASHINGTON — A newly formed committee of supporters of President Donald Trump said Sunday that each of his golf outings this term was “work, not golf,” and that his 2016 campaign pledge to have no time for golf is “being kept every single day, on a course.”
Trump said at a 2016 campaign rally that, if elected, “I’m going to be working for you, I’m not going to have time to go play golf,” according to published fact-checks of the remarks. In October 2014, he had posted that his predecessor spent a day golfing while the country faced serious problems.
Independent trackers count between roughly 90 and 140 golf days since January 2025, depending on whether a visit to a Trump-owned course counts as a round. At the high end of the range, that is about 22 percent of days in office. There is no official public log. A 2019 Government Accountability Office estimate put the cost of one presidential trip to Mar-a-Lago at about $3.4 million in 2017 dollars.
“It’s not golf if it’s a meeting, and it’s a meeting if he’s there,” said Nadine Overholt, 71, chair of the Committee for the Preservation of Working Golf, which was founded Saturday and has 212 members, all of whom have asked not to be asked about 2014. “The 18 holes are 18 briefings. Hole four is a briefing on the rough. The cart is a mobile situation room. The hot dog at the turn is a working lunch with a flag.”
Beckwith said a round of golf is “defined by who is holding the club.” “When a Democrat holds the club, it is golf, and it is a scandal,” she said. “When the president holds it, it is ‘an outdoor cabinet meeting with grass,’ and the grass is a stakeholder.”
The committee distributed a 14-page document titled “Golf Is Not Golf: A Definitions Guide.” Section 1 reads, “Golf is a leisure activity engaged in by persons not currently working.” Section 2 reads, “The president is always working. See Section 1.” Section 3 consists of a diagram of a tee, labeled “podium.”
Asked about the 2014 post, Beckwith said it concerned “a different kind of golf,” which she described as “golf with no agenda.” Asked how she knew his predecessor’s rounds had no agenda, she said, “He looked relaxed.”
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said in a phone call from a golf cart that the Institute “has studied the question, and the question is common sense.” “If a man says he won’t have time for golf, and he plays golf, then he had time. That’s not a contradiction, that’s a surplus,” Brickhouse said. He added that the Institute’s study was “conducted on the back nine.”
Dr. Marjorie Teller, director of the Center for Measured Outcomes, said her group had reviewed 400 instances in which a person criticized another person for an activity and later did it. “In 397, the person redefined the activity,” Teller said. “Among the redefinitions, ‘it’s different when I do it’ was the most common, followed by ‘it’s work.’ In three cases, the person said it was a hobby, and those three were later described by supporters as ‘a lapse.’”
A Mar-a-Lago club member who asked that his name be withheld said the course was “a very productive environment.” “I’ve been in many meetings out here, and I can tell you, most of them are just men standing around and looking at a hole,” the member said. “If that’s not governance, I don’t know what is.”
The committee said it plans to expand its definitions guide to cover a related question: whether a vacation is a vacation “if the person is on one.” A draft of that section, reviewed by the Reporter, reads, “A vacation is a trip taken by someone not working. See above.”
At press time, the committee was meeting at the 14th hole of a course in Florida. The group’s chair, Beckwith, said the meeting was “extremely substantive,” and that she had put a stroke on the board “for the record.”