How many days holiday should Trump take?

Sure, it’s acceptable. LBJ and George Bush and Reagan used to spend tons of time at their ranches at all times. There’s nothing sacrosanct about the White House. In fact, DC in the summer is beastly hot and unpleasant.

I think this vacation kerfuffle is a made-up controversy. You’re the president 24/7/365 whether you are in California, NJ,. Washington DC, or Hawaii. Saying that 17 days in New Jersey is too long – that’s just whining for the sake of whining.

The Mueller investigation is going to continue whether Trump is in Washington or not. The republicans are going to be dysfunctional no matter where the president is.

I guess it depends on how he’s allowed to spend his time.

For instance, can he drink alcohol, or use other drugs?

Trump is the king of bad judgement sober. I wouldn’t want a drunk Trump taking an emergency call, that needed quick/intelligent decision making.

Hopefully he’s “on call.” And has to be sober the whole time.

I do like the idea of him being away from things.

1,264 days
August 5, 2017 – January 20, 2021

Fake news !!.....and The White House is a dump, anyway. Plus, Bannon will be around to call all of the important…..or somewhat relevant…..or completely meaningless shots anyway.

So rest easy, all of you real Americans. Your boy has got everything covered.

And even when not, he knows you have granted him an unlimited number of ‘mulligans’ (aka ‘I don’t care’.....).

@MrGrimm888 Trump doesn’t drink alcohol or use drugs. He says that he’s never tried either, and this is the one thing about him that I believe to be true and genuine. If he’d ever had even a single cocktail, or used a recreational drug just once, there’d be someone jumping on the internet to tell us the whole story. I’m not suggesting that Trump is honorable, just that it’s difficult to lie about this sort of thing. Nobody has stepped forward to tell us about him drinking at a country club or getting high at a fraternity party.

This is the first time I’ve said anything remotely nice about Trump, and it’ll be the final time.

14 days

@Love_my_doggie . That almost makes everything worse. The fact that he was sober when talking about the pussy grabbing , and other remarks.

I am not a Trump supporter but..I have never had an issue with presidents taking holidays and vacations. My sentiments are who cares? People can gripe and whine all they want but hey, guess what, life isn’t fair and if you’re the president or any big wig CEO type vacations are part of the package and, while I loathe Trump I support presidents being able to get away from it all whenever they can.

As many as he wants.

So did everyone see the Newsweek cover?

@MrGrimm888 “That almost makes everything worse.” I couldn’t agree more. It’s frightening to think that Trump’s words and actions are rooted in a place of stone-cold sobriety.

To be non-hypocritical (re: his criticism of Obama taking one), zero golf days.

To be the best president he can be, he should take as many days off as possible.

Being POTUS is a full time, all the time job and so if he can get away to decompress a little, it could only help him. To compare him with “many people who get no holiday at all” is a little misleading. Are those people working jobs where they are on call 100% of the time? Are they working even full time jobs? It isn’t an apples to apples comparison. The same comparison was made with Obama and Bush and Clinton before him. The same answer applies to all. Now…that being said, I will throw the proviso in that if he starts taking vacations when big issues are going on or if Melania starts taking separate vacations to go globe trotting on the public dole, then he needs to be reeled in. There is a fine line between taking a break and abusing the system.

I say we should just reanimate Nixon, and wash our hands of the whole thing….

@PullMyFinger Disney has that robot version of Lincoln that just repeats the Gettysburg Address (or something like that) over and over; perhaps we should give that a shot at the office.

@Zaku A brilliant idea, and count me in.

We live only about 30 minutes from Disney World, so let me take the reins on this and get back to you…

I am not inclined to police the President’s vacation time—unlike the current President himself, who frequently criticized Obama for his vacation, and promised that he would be different. Which he is—he takes much more vacation that Obama did. Irony.

Still, I am inclined to cut him slack in this case, because a) Congress is in recess, so this is a normal time for the President to take vacation, and b) the White House is apparently getting its heating and air-conditioning systems renovated, which are nearly three decades old. I don’t expect Trump to stay there during that. So, he should take as many days as needed for the WH renovations to be completed or at least be done enough so he doesn’t have to put up with constant noise and workers traipsing through his quarters and work space.

Lastly, it’s also not like he’s off to an eco vacation in the jungle, away from civilization — if something noteworthy were to happen, he’ll be easy to reach, just tweet.

Which is too bad, really, because that works both ways. I wouldn’t mind 17 days off from his twitterage.

The presidency IS his vacation. A better question is, when do we get OUR vacation from this %$#&%+!?

Most “questions” about Trump on Fluther have a mocking, haughty tone.

I never knew much about Trump until July of 2016, and I was extremely impressed that he was campaigning in 3–4 rallies per day for several weeks straight. He was on at ten in the morning until late into the night. without even looking tired.

I cannot think of too many days when he hasn’t signed something, passed something. or announced something. When CNN said he and his family had a “bunker mentality’ cowering in the White House, he was actually in France—the third nation he visited in four days. Our stock market is at an all-time high for several weeks and over a million new jobs have been created. Veterans can now go to whatever hospital they choose rather than waiting many months for a procedure. I don’t recall any golfing that wasn’t with world leaders.

The rancor from the Left and the Media have been endless and world events have involved the constant threat of Islamic terror, North Korea, Venezuela, and Russia—regimes funded by previous administrations. Leaking of classified information has been more frequent than the number of days in office—and it appears much of this has been done by heads of state and departments whose job it was to protect our nation from such leaks

I don’t see a lot of down time

@Yellowdog What you view as constructive “up time”, many others see as a whole lot of inauthentic arm-waving by a half-sane lunatic whose insatiable appetite for praise and attention will certainly keep him energized long into the night, as long as enough people swallow whole what he claims are “facts”, or what ridiculous things he’s “going to do”.

Based on the apparent effectiveness of these tactics, maybe I’ll go buy a bullhorn and walk around our neighborhood well past midnight reminding everyone how “great” I can make everything, if they’ll just “give me a chance”.

I’ll see to it that crime falls to BELOW zero, and I’ll make every day SO beautiful that they’ll be SICK of beautiful days !! I’ll make their lawns look more glorious than they ever imagined, just on the sheer strength of my loud, confident, high-energy will.

When none of this actually occurs, I’ll just tell everyone that they took what I said “too literally”.....

@Yellowdog You are fighting an uphill battle here. The hatred of Trump is pretty thick with a lot of the Jellies. They will accuse him of everything under the sun and base their opinions on basically nothing. When asked what he has actually done wrong, there really is no answer except that they don’t like him. You are dealing with a group that believes that whatever you feel (as long as it is the same as them) is enough to qualify as fact and something to build on. If you feel differently than them you are wrong and subject to ridicule. Take it for what it is. Personally I think Trump is boorish and undignified. But those aren’t crimes. I also believe that if it weren’t for corrupt politicians and a biased media, he might actually be effective and making some real, effective change for this country. But again…this is a group that wants socialism and believes Obama and Hillary are the height of greatness in politicians.

@Yellowdog Trump is condemned by his own words. It was he who mocked Obama for taking time off to play golf and I don’t apologise for pointing out this instance of our president’s double standards and contempt for the truth.

@seawulf575 You shouldn’t confuse wanting high standards in public life with a ‘hatred of Trump’. We simply want a president who can tell the truth, who we can trust and respect. Is this really asking too much?

…..and a president who does not embarrass this country, making us all of us appear to be clueless rubes on an almost daily basis.

Any administration which casually advocates the “loosening up” of the Dodd-Frank Consumer Protection Act or de-funding (and possibly dismantling) the EPA in the name of “making our businesses more competitive” is not acting in the long-term interest of this country, or the well-being of its citizens (Pump your fists in the air all you like….you’re still on the wrong side of history).

Many people don’t remember rivers in Ohio literally on fire, or having trouble breathing while just walking around in our large cities before the EPA was created, but many of us do. Anyone who advocates the dismantling of the EPA should be stripped naked and thrown into The Fire Swamp (where they can breathe toxic air to their heart’s content).

That does not make those who remember ‘socialists’, just people who learn from history, and who take a stand against gullibly and foolishly letting so many things like this happen again…..

@flutherother No, that is indeed the goal. Too bad we haven’t had a president with those characteristics in a long, long time. Gotta go back decades to find one. And of the two major candidates we were offered in the past presidential election, we got the one that best meets those standards. The other option, of course, being Hillary who fails on telling the truth, trust, and respect far worse than Trump.

@PullMyFinger as with my response to flutherother, trying to find a president that does not embarrass this country and making us all appear to be clueless rubes is a fine goal. Too bad we haven’t had one of those in decades.
As for Dodd-Frank, it is a bill that hasn’t really worked as it was intended. It did manage to bloat the size of government and governmental oversight of the banking industry, but more bureaucracy is almost always a negative. You would be hard pressed to show one thing the government does smartly and efficiently and without some self-serving efforts. But when you compare pre and post D-F positions of banks on things like market value equity to total asset ratio you find that most major banks are worse off after D-F than before. D-F basically pushed banks closer to insolvency and is designed so that if they start to recover from that, it kicks them back down again. It could actually make another crash like we saw in 2008 more likely. So having the discussion of doing away with D-F is something that needs to happen.
As for EPA, again…more bureaucracy doesn’t mean it is effective. The EPA was created in response to a number of events. I grew up near Cleveland during its hey-day. I remember the Cuyahoga catching fire, and I remember the smell of the air. The EPA in itself is not really a bad idea. But like all portions of our government, it has bloated to the point where its control is onerous. Things like the Clean Water Rule are fine examples of where the EPA, without actual oversight by congress, is passing laws and changing laws. It is a rule that really oversteps the bounds of the government, dressed up with a “protection for the people” veneer. It basically allows government to totally control any land they want to deem as having a water source which can include things like rivers and streams but because the definitions are what they are, it can also include drainage ditches. I work in the environmental field and love the environment. But I recognize governmental overreach when I see it. This goes back to the ideas we used to see in Ohio as well where construction on or near wetlands was prohibited. Sounds good, right? Except you then have to define what construction was and more importantly what wetlands were. So here is a scenario that I actually saw play out. A guy wants to build a 8’x’10’ storage shed on his property. He goes and applies for the permit. The county then sends out the inspector who, seeing a puddle in his front yard (it rained the day before) declared the property wetlands and all construction was forbidden. This homeowner was now in a position of having to do lengthy legal battles to be able to do necessary repairs to his home. If he needed to replace his roof, he couldn’t since that was considered construction. There was no marsh, no swamp, no creek, no river…nothing that a reasonable person would have considered wetlands. But because he had a low spot in his yard a couple feet around that filled with water when it rained, his property by definition was wetlands. That is the example of governmental overreach. And that example happened long before Obama was in office when things with the EPA really grew.
Bigger government is almost always a bad thing. It costs more to operate, it puts many foolish restrictions over the people, and it rarely meets its intended goals because bureaucracy is always haunted by politics.

@seawulf575 I respect and appreciate everything that you have said here, and fully understand the ineptitude and frustration caused by government overreach. We all experience it in various ways, but as inconvenient as things can be down at the DMV, I still want them there, trying to keep the number of idiots on the road to a minimum.

And as long as the EPA does more good than harm, I am very offended by some political hack making public statements about dismantling the whole agency, when manufacturing companies have clearly shown us what they are capable and willing to do in the name of maximizing profit.

In my working life, for a few different manufacturing companies, I was responsible for legal disposal of hazardous waste, and was very disturbed by the number of times that CEOs and other “executives” were asking for “creative suggestions” for getting rid of toxic waste without complying with these very expensive EPA rules and regulations requiring safe disposal.

These questions are routinely thrown around in a million Conference Rooms everywhere in our country all the time. The only thing that (for the most part) dissuades these ‘business heroes’ from making our rivers burn again (and poisoning their own grandchildren) is fear of EPA fines, and the public shame the company will experience by the publicity attached to it.

So yes, the EPA may have become somewhat bloated and increasingly bureaucratic. But history proves that having it is light-years better than not having it.

And any clear-thinking person should be highly offended by some arm-waving, agenda-driven politician who has the audacity to stupidly and publicly proclaim that this agency should be completely dismantled…..

@PullMyFinger You and I have similar points of view. I feel that groups like the DMV or the EPA have a place in our world. But because of bloated government, their role gets warped and politicized. I just read a story about 6 DMV workers in Massachusetts that were arrested for voter registrations fraud. We took the DMV and used it to start registering people to vote (extend their power…bloat). Voting puts the DMV then right in the center of politics. Now political pressure and/or ideology comes into play and suddenly you have fraud. That sort of thing goes on all the time and gets worse the bigger the government gets. The EPA is a tool and can be a useful tool. But when the government starts bloating, it stops being a tool and becomes a weapon. I would (and have) argued against entirely dismantling the EPA for many of the same reasons you have stated. But another problem of a bloated government is that the power players want power. And because of that, they have a hard time with common sense solutions and end up trying to push extremes. We see it on both sides of the house. My take on the problems of this country, if you haven’t already figured it out, is bloated government. The federal government has specific duties that are outlined in the Constitution. Those not specified to the Feds belong to the States. It was set up that way so that the details are more easily controlled by the people. But over the past 100 years, we have turned that around so that everything is federal and the states are subservient. And as a result, the federal government has ballooned into a monstrosity that is self-serving and wants dominion over all.

@seawulf575 Points taken. And good ones.

My concerns go beyond that of just a bloated federal bureaucracy, to include the exponential devolvement of ethics in our business sector (which invites and creates even more government bureaucracy).

Couple that with a large portion of the populace remaining happily uninformed (do voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania really believe that Trump is going to miraculously resuscitate a filthy, outdated and less profitable coal industry ??) and there appears to be no end in sight on this pitiful merry-go-round.

At this point, all I ask is that our children and grandchildren get to breathe clean air and drink clean water while they are on the ride…..