Trump's promise to "work tirelessly" on Christmas means golfing with buddies and ignoring COVID relief

Despite his family's obvious affinity for Christmastime at the White House, Donald Trump has chosen to spend his last holiday season as president in Florida at Mar a Lago, the so-called "Winter White House" to which he frequently retreats when it comes time to do important president-ing.

Under normal circumstances, this would not in and of itself be all that noteworthy. Presidents frequently take some time off around the holidays (or, at least, ease up on their ordinarily breakneck schedules as much as the responsibilities of their office allows) and Trump is hardly the first executive to spend Christmas outside Washington. But these are not normal circumstances, and despite the White House's declaration that "during the Holiday season, President Trump will continue to work tirelessly for the American people" the president is instead spending his time relaxing with pals — even as perhaps the most significant legislation of the year sits waiting for his signature.

At around 10 a.m. on Christmas morning, President Trump hit the links, marking the second time in as many days that he's gone golfing at his Florida resort instead of handling the "many meetings and calls" promised on his official White House schedule for the day. Joining Trump was critic-turned-enabler Sen. Lindsey Graham, who just days earlier joined the president in demanding that the tenuously negotiated COVID relief bill be increased to include $2,000 direct payment checks, rather than the agreed upon $600.

Indeed, both the President seems so committed to raising the direct payment amount (largely over the objections of his own party, which nuked the Democrats' attempt to do just that) that he is pointedly ignoring the existing COVID relief bill that his own White House helped negotiate, and which simply needs his signature to rush paltry-but-better-than-nothing $600 checks to the public. Trump's being in Florida, and not at the White House is itself no obstacle to making sure the checks go out, either — the physical, hard copy of the bill was literally flown down to Mar a Lago on Thursday evening, where it sits in limbo between being signed into law, or vetoed into oblivion.

Either way, the president's conspicuous decision to spend his time golfing with pals instead of addressing the very real — and very time sensitive — piece of legislation that crossed state lines just for his sake is the perfect encapsulation of what the past four years of the Trump administration have been about: selfishness at the expense of everyone else.