The Tourist-in-Chief: Trump’s World Tour on Our Tab

How America’s president turned diplomacy into a taxpayer-funded costume party, one jet-setting humiliation at a time.

There’s a strange absurdity to living in America right now, a kind of national fever dream that keeps looping back on itself. Every week, the headlines read like parodies from The Onion, except they’re not — they’re official travel announcements from the White House. President Donald Trump is once again boarding Air Force One, bound for another “important” international trip. The destination? Maybe a golf course with a summit conveniently attached. Maybe a luxury hotel in a country that recently licensed a new Trump-branded property. Either way, the bill lands squarely where it always does — in the collective lap of American taxpayers.

It’s like we’re watching a man play dress-up with the machinery of the state. He flies off to Saudi Arabia or Scotland the way some people go to the mall: not because it’s necessary, but because it’s there. Each trip is a performance — the waving, the rhetoric, the red carpets rolled out on foreign runways — all of it theater. And we’re paying top dollar for tickets we never wanted.

The numbers are staggering. Between the Secret Service logistics, oversized entourages, hotel buyouts, and the steady whine of Air Force One engines, a single multi-nation trip can cost tens of millions. But what do we get in return? A few handshake photos, some rambling praise of authoritarian “friends,” and an incoherent Truth Social post about how America is respected again.

Donald loves to travel. It’s the one aspect of being president that fully aligns with his lifelong persona — the globe-trotting mogul surrounded by wealth, lights, and sycophants. He’s not exactly poring over policy memos on long flights; he’s the showman, the clown, the gossip columnist’s dream, the man with a global stage and an unlimited government credit card. Somewhere between the privilege of power and the pageantry of celebrity, he found his sweet spot: perpetual motion at the public’s expense.

What makes it all worse is how spectacularly he manages to embarrass the country in the process. Each trip becomes its own diplomatic train wreck — awkward press conferences, cringe-worthy compliments to dictators, impulsive insults lobbed at allies, and those infamous photo ops that somehow make everyone but Trump look like the adult in the room. World leaders smile politely while quietly questioning whether America has lost its mind. Meanwhile, domestic audiences are left watching, slack-jawed, as the supposed leader of the free world turns international diplomacy into a reality show blooper reel.

The humiliation is cumulative. Every time Trump fumbles through another press conference or delivers one of his rambling off-script digressions about crowd sizes or “tremendous relationships,” the authority and credibility of the United States erode a little further. He doesn’t represent strength or strategy abroad — he represents nonsensical spectacle. The United States, once seen as a stabilizing force, now too often looks like the punchline at a global summit.

There’s something darkly comedic about how normalized this has become. The jet-setting president who rails against “elites” while dining with them in gilded halls. The man of the people whose every trip requires a convoy of armored SUVs and a budget that could fix a water system in Flint twice over. Yet in the theater of American politics, consistency doesn’t matter — only performance does.

And although the village idiot knows almost nothing, he seems to understand the value of performative buffoonery. His trips are content — B-movie set pieces broadcast on every major network. The image of Trump stumbling down airplane stairs with flags flapping behind him isn’t diplomacy; it’s a commercial. It says, “Look at me, I’m still the main character.” And like everything in the Trumpverse, it’s always about branding— not the country, not the people footing the bill.

Maybe that’s the most absurd part: I’m complicit. I click, I share, I joke. The spectacle feeds on attention, and I’m endlessly distracted. I loathe him, yet I keep watching. He knows it, and he plays me accordingly. The grift works because it’s entertaining, and attention is the only constant currency left in this democracy-by-algorithm.

At some point, we’ll have to reckon with what all this costs — not just in dollars, but in dignity. The presidency was once a role defined by service, restraint, and the sobering weight of responsibility. Now it feels more like a nut job’s personal travel vlog with nuclear codes. It’s galling, sure, but also weirdly fitting for a country addicted to spectacle. Donald the traveler, Donald the tourist-in-chief, Donald the village idiot with a passport and a mission to be noticed: he’s the perfect symbol for an empire that can’t tell governance from entertainment anymore.

We get the leaders we deserve, but not necessarily the travelers we can afford.