The following article by Kenneth T. Wash was posted on the U.S. News and World Report website March 17, 2017:
President Donald Trump prefers to be sealed inside his White House bubble of isolation and adoration.
Donald Trump is enjoying the most ostentatious lifestyle of any president in a half century and perhaps in U.S. history. Even the richest presidents of the past, including John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, had a sense of limits in showing off their wealth. Not Trump. He loves to display his gilded lifestyle and vast fortune, exemplified by his glittering homes at Mar-a-Lago in Florida and Trump Tower in Manhattan. He is shattering the norms of how America’s top leader behaves and operates, and it could set precedents, both good and bad, for how presidents operate in the future. One impact could be in reducing transparency in how the president makes decisions, where he gets his ideas, and whom he turns to for advice.
Details of Trump’s presidential lifestyle are gradually emerging. Politico found that Trump “is sticking to his comfort zone,” spending most nights either at the White House, sometimes alone, or at Mar-a-Lago during his golf-filled weekends. He has visited a few other places, such as a Boeing plant, a Florida elementary school and military bases but the people he is in contact with are generally the rich and the nation’s elites, including business executives and members of Congress. He still loves to address big, adoring crowds as he did during the campaign and which he did again in Nashville this week. He is animated by the energy of his supporters, which is common among presidents. The difference is that Trump often seems sealed inside the White House bubble of isolation and adoration and he likes it there. The information he gets about the wider world is usually drawn from cable TV news shows and friends around the country, especially in New York, who communicate with him via his cellphone and emails, White House officials and Trump’s friends say. Continue reading “The Gilded President”