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It has become a familiar routine for the Palm Beach county sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, and his deputies. Almost every Tuesday in recent weeks, the Federal Aviation Administration has posted to its website a formal “notice to airmen” advising of upcoming flight restrictions over south Florida, signaling once again to those who must protect him that Donald Trump is on his way to Mar-a-Lago for another weekend of golf.
The president is at his waterfront mansion again this weekend, his sixth visit to Florida and the beloved golf courses he owns since his 20 January inauguration.
His increasingly frequent and disruptive trips home are fast becoming a drain on county resources, obligating Bradshaw to put helicopters in the air, extra manpower on the ground, and boats on both sides of Trump’s opulent mansion sandwiched between the Atlantic and the Intracoastal Waterway almost continuously.
The demands from the Secret Service to help them protect Trump, and the president’s family and entourage, are “substantial”, the sheriff told county commissioners last month, just before the president flew in for an extended six-day visit.
“They request it, and then we provide it. It’s expensive, but we don’t really have a choice,” Bradshaw said.
The sheriff’s office declined to immediately provide the Guardian with a detailed breakdown of its expenditure, but the daily overtime bill alone has previously been reported to be $240,000.
Commissioners approved Bradshaw’s “urgent request” of $45m to provide security for Trump’s visits through November, an invoice he said was certain to rise.
“We’ve already heard some information where he may be spending more time here than in Washington,” Bradshaw said.
“Definitely you’re going to see him bringing in leaders from the world. That is a significant shift in the cost for security.”
The Palm Beach bill, high as it is, pales against the federal costs of indulging the commander-in-chief’s wanderlust. That’s included his multimillion-dollar trip to the Super Bowl in New Orleans last month, and an appearance at Nascar’s Daytona 500 weeks later, which critics saw as little more than an extravagant and expensive photo op.
Whenever he wishes to roam, the presidential airliner Air Force One is fueled up and fully staffed, racking up an hourly operational cost approaching $200,000, according to a 2022 air force assessment.
With a roughly two-hour flight time from Washington DC, each visit to and from Palm Beach international airport costs taxpayers about a million dollars just in travel, once an additional cargo flight carrying the presidential motorcade is factored in, as well as ferrying Trump from the White House to Joint Base Andrews on the Marine One helicopter.
The most recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, meanwhile, calculated in 2019 that federal agencies spent an average of $13.6m on each of four Trump odysseys to Mar-a-Lago that it audited during his first term in office, with a chunk of that money going straight into Trump’s pocket.
In 2017, he spent four of the first seven weekends immediately after his inauguration golfing in Florida; this year the tally is already at six.
Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), which tallied more than 500 first-term visits by Trump to properties he owned, said the pattern was already repeating itself.
“We start with the clear principle that presidents are entitled to Secret Service protection wherever they go, and have their transportation covered. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that when he does any of the things he does,” he said.
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“However, there are serious issues. One is that he maintained ownership of his businesses, so this is not a question of going to the president’s house; it’s going to the president’s business where payment is made directly to a business that benefits the president.”
“We want the presidency to be the main focus of the president. That’s not to say presidents don’t have time to recharge and take a break like everybody else, but when you go to your own business property it moves the focus, at least potentially, from your official duties to promoting and attending to your business.
“And that is a different kind of problem than taking more weekends off than we’d like, or how often a president plays golf, or anything like that.”
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said he had similar concerns, pointing to evidence of Trump excessively overcharging the Secret Service to stay at his properties during his first administration.
“As much as the waste of taxpayer resources for excessive vacationing is, there’s the self-enrichment from the payments made to Mar-a-Lago by agents who were there to provide security,” he said.
“Of course, Trump famously ran the first time complaining about the amount of golf that Barack Obama played, which was more or less local and didn’t require plane travel. Our strong preference is that Trump flies to Florida, and stays there for full-time retirement.”
Ultimately, Palm Beach county expects to be reimbursed with federal funds for what it spends protecting the president. But that is little consolation to residents who are now footing the bill while enduring numerous road closures and other inconveniences every weekend.
Trump’s constant visits to Mar-a-Lago, which he calls his “winter White House”, were examined by journalist Victoria De Cardenas last month during a news segment titled Wa$te Watch on Palm Beach television station CBS12.
“We do think it’s worth considering whether, for the benefit of taxpayers and commuters who have been caught up in the freeway shutdowns during Friday night rush hour more than once lately, maybe he could spend the weekend in the real White House a little more often,” she said.
