AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File
- The Washington Post reported that President Trump has installed a full-size golf simulator in the White House.
- Trump regularly leaves the White House to play golf on courses he owns.
- The White House was not immediately available for comment.
President Donald Trump had a new golf simulator installed in the White House that’s the size of an entire room, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
Trump had the golf simulator installed in his personal quarters over the past few weeks. The setup allows the president to play a virtual game of golf by hitting a ball into a screen and is a newer version of a simulator first put in the White House by former President Barack Obama, The Post reported.
According to The Post, Trump has not used the golf simulator during what has become known as "executive time," which allows for loosely organized meetings and calls the president makes during the day and takes up much of his schedule, according to leaked documents.
Read more: What Trump is doing during the hours of ‘executive time’ on his leaked schedules
The simulator reportedly cost about $50,000. A White House official told The Post that Trump paid for the simulator with his own money, not taxpayer funds.
A spokesperson for the White House was not immediately available for comment.
Trump has pushed back against accusations that the large amounts of executive time prevent him from being fully engaged during his workdays, writing on Twitter recently that he is a very hard worker.
"The media was able to get my work schedule, something very easy to do, but it should have been reported as a positive, not negative," he wrote. "When the term Executive Time is used, I am generally working, not relaxing. In fact, I probably work more hours than almost any past President….."
Trump frequently departs the White House to hit the links at the many golf courses he owns across the US, including his courses in Virginia, New Jersey, and Florida.
While Trump has played golf or visited his clubs well over 100 times since becoming president, he stayed in the White House during the record long government shutdown, with the exception of a brief trip to Iraq to visit US military personnel.
Shortly after the government shutdown ended, Trump took a trip to Mar-a-Lago, his golf club in Florida.
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See Also:
- Trump says freshman Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar should resign after tweets containing ‘anti-Semitic tropes’
- Trump appears to have already soured on border-security plan, saying it would be Democrats’ fault if the government shuts down again
- The chances of another government shutdown are rising after border-security negotiations hit a serious snag
SEE ALSO: Here’s what became of the losers of every presidential election since 2000
Source: Business Insider