Platypus Thoughts

Trump has surpassed $26 million dollars in taxpayer money spent golfing already this term. March 29 was Trump’s 18th day spent golfing since he was sworn in on Jan. 20. He has, so far, according to HuffPost, spent more than a quarter of his second term golfing.

18 golf dates ÷ 69 days = 26% of time in office
$26,127,531 total cost so far ÷ 18 golf dates (14 played at Mar-A-Lago) = $1,451,529.50 average cost per golf date.

Mr. Trump spent $151.5 million playing golf during his entire first term. At the current rate of 26% of his time spent golfing during the current term, we will pay more than $551 million dollars for him to play golf during his second term.

365 days x 4 years = 1,460 days
26% of 1,460 days = 380 projected golf dates
380 days at $1,451,529.50 average per golf date = $551,581,210

(Sorry, old math teachers die hard.)

One wonders where the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) comes down on this expense. The obvious answer is that the cost of babysitting an overgrown two-year-old is worth it. Get the little dementor out of the way so the work of dismantling a 250-year-old democracy can go on in earnest. The embarrassment of having a lying, cheating brat on the golf course being less offensive than having a lying, cheating, imbecile with a big mouth mucking about in the work of the disorganized demolition of life as we know it.

Priceless.

For the record, it is unlikely Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned. While not a nice person in many respects, Nero did not fiddle. Rather, he was proficient on the cithara, a forerunner of the lute. And he was not in Rome during said fire.

“When the Great Fire broke out, Nero was at his villa at Antium, some 35 miles from Rome. Though he immediately returned and began relief measures, people still didn’t trust him. Some even believed he had ordered the fire started, especially after he used land cleared by the fire to build his Golden Palace and its surrounding pleasure gardens.

“Nero himself blamed the Christians (then an obscure religious sect) for the fire, and had many arrested and executed. But while Nero may have been guilty of many things, the story of him fiddling while Rome burned belongs firmly in the category of popular legend rather than established truth.” https://www.history.com/articles/did-nero-really-fiddle-while-rome-burned

However, the term “to fiddle while Rome burns” — “to enjoy yourself or continue working as normal and not give any attention to something important and unpleasant that is happening that you should be taking action to prevent,” according to the Cambridge Dictionary — is a perfect description of the activities of the idiot puppet in our White House.

I’ll save the bit about how Nero blaming the Christians and having them arrested and executed is echoed by the rounding up and deporting of people Trump is afraid of for another post. Or maybe that’s too obvious to point out …