Edinburgh, Scotland (AP) – During sweaty summer months, Abraham Lincoln often moved about three miles (5 kilometers) north of the White House. Soldier’s Housethe president’s resignation Cottages and Parkland What is the Petworth section of Northwest Washington today?
Ulysses S. Grant sometimes spent the summer His family cottage in Long Branch, New JerseySometimes driving teams of horses on the beach. Ronald Reagan once said he had “some of my best thoughts” on him Rancho Delciero Retreat outside Santa Barbara, California.
Donald Trump’s Getaway takes him quite far from the country’s capital from the Scottish coast.
President Donald Trump plays golf at the Trump Turnberry Golf Course in Turnberry, Scotland on Sunday, July 27, 2025 (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
The White House is not calling Trump Five Days Midsummer Junt It’s a holiday, but a practical trip where the Republican president holds a press conference and may sit down for an interview with us and the British media. Trump also spoke about trade in separate meetings with the European Commission chief. Ursula von der Leyen And the British Prime Minister Keyer priority.
Trump is staying at his property near Turnberry and Aberdeen. His family owns two golf courses, and one-third opened on August 13th. I played golf on Turnberry on the weekend. I’m helping to cut the ribbons on my new course on Tuesday.
He is not the first president to play in Scotland. Dwight D. Eisenhower played for Turnberry in 1959. However, none of Trump’s predecessors have built a foreign itinerary about promoting vacation sites owned by his family, and are actively expanding itineraries.
It bares how Trump has He used his second term to fill his family’s interests Despite growing questions about ethical concerns, in a variety of ways, including overseas development transactions and promoting cryptocurrency.
“We must see this as yet another attempt to monetize Donald Trump’s presidency,” said Leonard Steinhorn, who teaches political communication and courses about American culture and contemporary presidents at American universities. “In this case, we are using travel as a promotional opportunity to promote the golf course.”
The president usually leaves in the US
Franklin D. Roosevelt went to the Bahamas five times between 1933 and 1940 for excellent fishing. Campelo Island In 1933, 1936 and 1939, when I was a child, I took vacation in New Brunswick.
Amberjack, a 45-foot schooner with President Franklin D. Roosevelt sitting and wearing a sailor’s hat, is shown sailing from Buzzard Bay, Massachusetts, towards Campobello Island off the coast of Maine during his June 1933 holiday. (AP photos, files)
Reagan spent his vacation in Barbados in 1982 after meeting with Caribbean leaders and warning of the Marxist threat that could spread across the region from nearby Grenada.
Also, the president will not go on vacation at all. They travel with a large entourage, receive explanations of intelligence, make calls, or work away from Washington. But coming back to the US has long been the norm.
Harry S. Truman helped make Key West, Florida. “Little White House” Cottage There. Several presidents, including James Buchanan and Benjamin Harrison, visited Victorian architecture in Cape May, New Jersey.
President Harry Truman will hold a holiday press conference on March 18, 1949, surrounded by media members at Little White House Loan in Key West, Florida. (AP photo/file)
President Barack Obama follows her daughter Maria Obama, who rides a bike in West Tisbury, Massachusetts, and West Tisbury, Massachusetts, on August 22, 2015 during Obamas’ annual holiday. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
More recently, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama helped tourism at Martha’s vineyards in Massachusetts, while Trump supported Palm Beach, Florida. Frequent trips to his Mar-A-Lago real estate. However, the tourist lifts that Trump has obtained from his visit to Scotland are likely to benefit his family the most.
“Every president is forced to force politics and fun on holiday,” Jeffrey Engel, director of the Presidential History Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, added that Trump “is showing his priorities.”
“When he is thinking about how he wants to spend his free time, A., golf, B., visit places where he has investments and C, strengthen those investments, and that was not a priority for the previous president, but that’s his vacation time,” Engel said.
Even Trump’s departure from his first term was when he found a way to narrow down his visit to his property during a work-focused trip. Trump stopped at a Hawaii resort to thank staff after his visit Pearl Harbor Memorial Site And before I set out on a trip to Asia in November 2017. I played golf on Turnberry Before meeting Finland’s Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2018.
Trump once condemned the idea of taking leave as president.
“Don’t take a vacation. What’s the point? If you’re not enjoying your job, you’re doing the wrong job,” Trump wrote in his 2004 book, Think a Billionaire. During the 2015 presidential election, he vowed that he “rarely leaves the White House.”
In his speech at the AI summit held in Washington on Wednesday, Trump debated his predecessor flying long golf distances – what he’s doing now.
“After they talk about their carbon footprint, Obama will jump on the 747, Air Force 1, fly to Hawaii and play golf rounds and come back,” he said.
Presidential holidays and travel abroad were once taboos
Trump is not the first president who doesn’t want to make public his vacation.
George Washington has been criticized for embarking on a tour of New England to promote the presidency. A long visit to his family’s farm in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1797 caused problems when his successor, John Adams, left the then Philadelphia capital. James Madison left Washington for several months after the war in 1812.
Teddy Roosevelt helped unlock modern presidential holidays by chartering special trains in 1902 and instructing key staff to rent a nearby home Sagamou Hillaccording to the White House Historical Society.
Four years later, Roosevelt once again improved his tradition. This time he became the first president to leave the country while in office. “The 30-day Roosevelt trip by yachts and battleships to tour the construction of the Panama Canal will violate US traditions for 117 years by bringing the president outside the government’s jurisdiction in Washington.”
In the decades that followed, the president’s choice of leave has become part of their political persona, even outside the United States.
In addition to New Jersey, Grant relaxed at Martha’s vineyard. Calvin Coolidge spent the 1928 Christmas holiday on Sapero Island, Georgia. Lyndon B. Johnson had his “Texas White House” Hill Country Lunch.
Eisenhower went on vacation in Newport, Rhode Island. John F. Kennedy went to Palm Springs, California, and to his family’s compounds in the port of Hyannis, Massachusetts. Richard Nixon has the “South White House” in Key Biscayne, Florida, and Joe Biden frequently traveled to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, visiting Nantucket, Massachusetts, and St. Croix Island.
From left, President George W. Bush is caught in his catch as his daughter, Barbara Bush and fishing guide Billy Bush are watching on June 30, 2007 in Kennevinkport, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukati, File)
George H.W. Bush frequently visited his family’s estate in Kennebunkport, Maine, and did not divert the start of the Gulf War in 1991 from a month’s holiday there. His son, George W. Bush, chose the ranch in Crawford, Texas, rather than a more luxurious destination.
While presidential visits support tourism in some places than elsewhere, Engel said to some Americans that “if a retired state president goes somewhere, you want to go to the same place.”
He said that visitors emulating presidential leave “maybe you bump into him or her to show that you understand the same value as him or her, to show that you are as cool as him or her.”
