staffers no longer try to trick "the president into doing his job", because nothing hurts him w base
Were it not for his day job, Trump’s lifestyle would be perfectly appropriate for a wealthy 72-year-old in semi-retirement: hours of television in the morning, golf during the day, dinners with friends at the country club at night.
At first, Trump staffers tried to trick the president into doing his job, merging his professional duties with playtime—turning golf outings into political planning sessions, for instance, or scheduling working lunches with foreign leaders. Yet after initially trying to adapt Trump to the presidency, they seem to have conceded that Trump has remade the office in his image. Like other members of his professional class, Trump will take Augusts off. He will play golf multiple times per week, while expensing the costs. And he justifies his downtime as necessary to recharge his creative energies. (”He never switches off and needs constant human interaction, [and] feeds off of the stream of club members coming up to him and praising him,” Swan notes.)
These days, Trump’s babysitters are more like chaperones, allowing the president to blow off steam on Twitter and do and say what he likes. The logic, perhaps, is that Trump has already demonstrated that nothing he does can hurt his popularity with his base, which has maintained its support of him through Charlottesville and Helsinki and the horror of family separation. At this point, his staffers seem to realize, they might as well let Trump be Trump.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/donald-trump-white-house-golf-vacations
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