President Joe Biden is embarking on his August vacation on the heels of perhaps the most successful short stretch of his first term.
Biden, who only recently emerged from isolation due to a two-week bout with COVID-19 and appears to have some lingering effects, will be staying at Kiawah Island, South Carolina, a resort near Charleston.
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The White House isn’t saying how long Biden will stay, but he’s a relatively frequent vacationer as president, especially at the properties he owns in his home state of Delaware.
Biden has visited Delaware 48 times as president, with 41 visits to Wilmington and nine to Rehoboth Beach, according to former CBS correspondent Mark Knoller. He was seen climbing aboard Air Force One with his controversial son, Hunter.
“Every time I get a chance, I go home to Delaware. You think I’m joking. I’m not,” Biden said earlier this year.
This will be Biden’s first trip to Kiawah Island as president, though he was a regular visitor there during his time as vice president.
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates assured that Biden will stay busy in South Carolina.
“The presidency is a nonstop job that chief executives can do from anywhere in the world,” Bates said. “President Biden is constantly focused on the numbers that are most important to the American people: lowering costs for families, like prescription drugs and energy, reducing the deficit to fight inflation, creating the most jobs of any year in American history, growing the membership of NATO, and passing the most significant gun reform law in almost 30 years.”
After spending more than a quarter of his first year in office in Delaware, typically on weekends, as of June, Biden was on pace to spend more time vacationing than any of the previous four presidents. He’ll now head to the Southeast to enjoy the historic coastal area, which has prompted criticism from conservatives.
“Joe Biden is out of office and out of touch — Biden thinks he is entitled to another undeserved vacation while Americans cannot escape the historic inflation, recession, and high gas prices he created,” said Republican National Committee spokeswoman Emma Vaughn. “Because of Joe Biden’s failures, voters will send Democrats packing in November.”
Any criticism Biden receives for the trip or otherwise isn’t warranted, Bates said.
“I can’t hear [critics] over the sound of the most productive legislative record of any president since LBJ,” Bates said. “Also, did you know 43 Republican senators voted to continue letting Big Pharma price-gouge American families who need insulin?”
Though experts such as presidential historian Craig Shirley say the burdens of office travel with the commander in chief no matter where he goes, presidential vacations are nonetheless closely scrutinized and often criticized.
Former President Donald Trump’s golf outings were obsessively tracked by various outlets. A tracker called Trump Golf Count says the former president visited golf clubs 298 times while in office, with “evidence” of playing golf at least 150 times.
Trump referred to his trips as “working vacations” and criticized predecessor Barack Obama as a “habitual vacationer” who spent too much time on the golf course. Trump was then called out for his own jaunts to New Jersey and Florida after taking office.
But in terms of the sheer number of vacation days, Biden is set to top Trump, on pace for 553 days away from the White House by the end of his first term, compared to 381 for Trump. Obama spent 328 days away over two terms.
Biden isn’t nearly as much of a golfer as his predecessors but also is a much lighter interviewer. Biden has done 20 interviews to date, not including televised town halls, compared with 100 at this point in his presidency for Trump and 206 for Obama, according to Knoller. He does take questions sometimes following speeches or while approaching or departing Marine One.
Presidents have typically held news conferences prior to leaving on August vacations, but Biden did not do so, continuing a trend of infrequent direct questioning of the president by news reporters.
“He’s ducking the media,” Shirley said. “He’s ducking the hard questions he might get.”
While vacations may not matter on their own, they do tend to get wrapped up in the wider narrative presidents create for themselves, Shirley argues.
“If everything is going to hell in the country and … the president goes on vacation, people will hold it against him,” he said. “If things are going well in the country, he can go on vacation for the rest of his presidency and people won’t care.”
In that sense, leaving for vacation the same day an inflation rate of 8.5% was announced might be less than ideal.
Despite any criticism, Biden has enjoyed a run of success lately, signing the CHIPS and Science Act and the PACT Act into law, touting lower gas prices, and even seeing a modest rebound in approval ratings over the past two weeks, up to a still-low 40% from 36% earlier this summer.
He could soon sign another bill into law, this one a reconciliation billl Democrats have dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act. The House is set to vote on a final version of the bill in the coming days, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, when asked by a reporter on Tuesday, did not say if Biden would halt any vacation to sign it in Washington.
“We’re going to work closely with the House to get that passed in the next couple of days,” she said. “And once we have more to share, we will share his schedule if that changes.”
Biden’s relative success of late correlated with his time in isolation, and he will stay out of the spotlight with the South Carolina trip. Noting the correlation, a reporter asked Jean-Pierre last Wednesday whether the president should work remotely more often.
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“My goodness,” Jean-Pierre responded. “Look, the president is going to continue to work for the American people, regardless — it doesn’t matter where he is. … I hear what you’re saying, but we’ve had successes over the last 18 months. It’s not just been this week. We had the American Rescue Plan. We had the bipartisan infrastructure deal. We’ve had other successes in this White House.”
