White House officials, including Press Secretary Sean Spicer, have released few details about these visits except for their locations; Trump-owned golf clubs near his Mar-a-Lago resort.  According to Spicer, these visits are little-documented for the sake of the new President’s privacy, and many international dignitaries have joined him in the game.

However, this seeming lack of discrepancy has fueled doubts about Trump’s real intentions.  Spicer’s claims are widely disputed, and even for those who believe them, the idea of entertaining dignitaries at one of his own properties echoes a similar controversy about Trump using his Mar-a-Lago resort to host confidential conversations.  With a 41 percent approval rating and several ongoing controversies, Trump’s golfing habits are being used as yet another talking point for politicians across the board.

Most notably, the Trump opposition has cited a multitude of tweets from before the 2016 election, in which Trump criticized Obama’s golfing habits.  According to these tweets, Obama played 333 rounds during his eight-year presidency, which Trump took as a sign of inefficiency.  In spite of his long-running habit, though, detractors have noted that Obama did not start playing until “almost the 100-day mark of his presidency.”  When stacked up against this precedent, they claim, Trump’s behavior appears hypocritical and irresponsible.

For many who oppose Trump, the golf games would have been a non-issue, were they not used as a talking point against the previous president.  In the meantime, reporters continue to scour social media for evidence of Trump’s visits, further evincing that they are just another private presidential affair that is no longer secret from the public eye.

There’s a zinger in the Biblical book of Matthew that goes, “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?” While I doubt Jesus was addressing a slow-starting American president a couple of millennia later, the rhetorical hyperbole is unfolding right before our eyes in Washington.

Remember how Trump fought with the National Park Service about his inauguration crowd size? Or, how Trump, an avid Twitter user, took away social media privileges from the National Park Service and other science-minded government agencies? Who can forget the president’s terrible budget proposalreleased last month that’ll “Make America Great Again” by slashing what makes our country great in the first place? Among those is, to nobody’s surprise, the National Park Service; the Interior Department would face a 12 percent drop in funding, and deep cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture and Army Corps of Engineers means that Park Rangers would have to do more with less in order to maintain federally-protected public land.

Trump seems to be giving Park Rangers a stone in comparison as he finally follows through with his campaign promise of donating his $400,000 presidential salary. At a press conference April 3, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer handed Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke an oversized check for $78,333. A press release by Zinke indicated that the money will go to preserving national battlefields, a valuable asset often ignored in favor of preserving national parks. Zinke also stated that, “We’re about $229 million behind in deferred maintenance on our battlefields alone.” So much for loving our country’s selfless warriors as we put “America First.”

This drop in the bucket of funding is an obvious publicity stunt without the risks of a stunt. It attempts to distract from the fact that, on paper, Trump doesn’t seem to care about the things he claims to value in this country. The military? Though his budget boosts defense spending overall, it comes with no input from the Armed Forces and leaves the Coast Guard and Army Corps of Engineers with deep cuts as he tries to partially replace these cuts with a border wall. Veterans? Trump proposed boosting the Department of Veterans affairs by a mere 6 percent while the healthy Homeland Security and Defense Departments get 7 percent and 10 percent increases, respectively, not to mention Trump’s insulting past commentsabout veterans’ mental health. Urban core neighborhoods? Ben Carson is in charge of Housing and Urban Development.

So with this minuscule check, Trump continues a pattern of claiming dedication to the United States without actually demonstrating it. If his proposed funding and past statements didn’t make it obvious, his golfing trips to Mar-a-Largo nearly every weekend paints a picture as clear as his tacky 6 foot tall portraits of himself, paid for with donated money, of course. Perhaps Congress can see if the Holman rule, which allows them to reduce a federal employee’s salary to one dollar, works on the president. Perhaps then the National Park Service or the National Endowment for the Arts can have $400,000 thrown their way, or worse yet, none at all.