A Homebody President Sits Out His Honeymoon Period

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/us/politics/travel-trump-obama-bush.html

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WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump has become a virtual homebody during his first few months in office, largely sitting out the honeymoon period that other presidents have used to hit the road and rally support for their priorities.

Mr. Trump, who dislikes spending the night away from home and has been adapting to life at the White House, has rarely ventured far from the Executive Mansion or his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida during his first 85 days in office. He has not strayed west of the Mississippi River, appearing at public events in only seven states and eschewing trips overseas. He is planning to travel to Wisconsin on Tuesday, and his first international trip is scheduled for next month, when he is to visit Brussels and Italy for meetings with world leaders.

By contrast, President Barack Obama had made public appearances in nine states and taken three overseas trips by this point in his presidency, and was beginning his fourth journey abroad. And President George W. Bush had stopped in 23 states by mid-April during his first year in office and also visited Canada.

“We are not seeing this president following the norm of going out to the public and making his case in the same way as presidents have for as far back as you want to go,” said James A. McCann, a professor of political science at Purdue University who has studied presidential travel patterns. “Trump is going to his own drummer, as usual. It’s a risky strategy.”

Most presidents, hoping to seize on the public optimism that normally accompanies the start of a new administration, head out into the country to promote their agendas and apply political pressure — overt or otherwise — on lawmakers to fall in line. But Mr. Trump has held just a small number of political rallies in Florida, Tennessee and Kentucky, all states he won comfortably; visited a pair of military bases in Virginia and Florida; and spoken to aerospace and automotive workers in South Carolina and Michigan.

“When you’re president, you don’t travel to get frequent flier miles — you travel to make a point,” said Ari Fleischer, a former press secretary to Mr. Bush, who used one elaborate tour to stop in states of Democratic senators whose support he needed for his tax-cut plan.

“It’s surprising,” he continued, referring to Mr. Trump, “that he hasn’t used that power of the presidency to announce big policy initiatives and really drive home his point.”

The White House says Mr. Trump, who has faced vexing problems at home and abroad, has avoided travel in order to focus on an ambitious domestic agenda, including the signing of executive orders and legislation to roll back Obama-era regulations. And he has used his time at the White House and at Mar-a-Lago to host an array of foreign leaders in an effort to repair relationships around the world.

“Every time you travel, you’re eating up a big chunk of the day, so you have to be really strategic about it,” said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary. “When you’re really trying to get a lot done, you have to budget your time very carefully, and we’re going to continue to be smart about the best use of his time, because his time is his most valuable asset.”

“The pace of his schedule has been nonstop,” Mr. Spicer added.

While the president has stayed close to home, he has dispatched Vice President Mike Pence to go farther afield. With Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago for Easter weekend, Mr. Pence arrived in Seoul, South Korea, on Sunday to start a 10-day trip through Asia, during which North Korea’s provocations were to be a major topic of discussion.

Members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet have also traveled extensively, with Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia last week and the defense secretary, Jim Mattis, traveling to South Korea and Japan in February.

White House officials had said Mr. Trump planned to travel extensively after his address to a joint session of Congress in February, as many presidents do to promote the domestic proposals featured in their State of the Union addresses. But a road show never materialized.

Mr. Fleisher said that was not entirely a surprise. “It makes some sense that Donald Trump, whose candidacy was so much more about him — how he was different, how he could change Washington — rather than specific policy proposals, that his travel would be more about him personally than any initiative,” he said.

The travel that Mr. Trump has done has often been more about his own political future than about policy persuasion.

“What’s striking with President Trump is not only how contained his travel has been, but how much of it is around campaign rallies, rather than something he wants to get done,” said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a Brookings Institution scholar who has studied presidential travel.

If Mr. Trump were following past practice, Dr. Tenpas added, he would have traveled the country to push the Republican plan to overhaul health care, his first foray into legislative deal making. That effort collapsed last month after both conservative and moderate Republicans joined Democrats in opposing it.

But Mr. Spicer argued that a presidential road show on health care would not have changed the outcome, because Democrats had dug in against the plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act from the start.

“That was pretty much a baked deal from the get-go,” he said.

For now, the most frequent destination for Mr. Trump outside Washington has been Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla. He returned on Thursday, making a trip for Easter weekend — his seventh since taking office — that included near-daily stops at his golf resort in West Palm Beach. Since becoming president, Mr. Trump has spent 24 days at the exclusive club, sometimes called the Winter White House.

The president has used Mar-a-Lago as a staging ground for meetings with foreign leaders, including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and President Xi Jinping of China.

Democrats and government watchdog groups have questioned the cost of the president’s Palm Beach excursions, and late last month, the Government Accountability Office began a review of the security procedures at Mar-a-Lago and the expense incurred by taxpayers for Mr. Trump’s trips there.

The president’s limited travel stands in stark contrast with his approach during his campaign, when he kept up a rapid pace of events throughout the country. But it may be in line with his approach of making spontaneous decisions that have at times left White House aides struggling to respond.

Presidential travel is complicated and time-consuming to plan, from scouting locations to determining a secure route for the motorcade. And Mr. Trump has vacillated about what his first policy priorities will be — shifting from health care to tax cuts and back to health care — which has most likely made it difficult to plot a travel schedule that would give him a strategic advantage.

Mr. Spicer argued that was not a factor in Mr. Trump’s limited travel schedule.

“It’s all about priorities,” he said.