Breaking : US taxpayers have shelled out tens of millions of dollars for Trump’s golf trips

The president, who derided Barack Obama for golfing while in office, even makes money off his Mar-a-Lago weekends.

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 jet 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.