For Biden, there’s no place like a weekend home in Delaware

WILMINGTON, DEL. >> Ashe stood in the Rose Garden celebrating his first big legislative win, President Joe Biden gestured to the White House and said it’s a “magnificent building” to live in.

Except on weekends. Of the eight weekends since Biden took office, he has spent three at his longtime home outside Wilmington, Delaware, including this weekend. Tentative plans for another weekend visit were scrubbed due to Senate action on Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan.

Biden also spent a weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.

Many presidents have complained at one point or another about feeling confined in the White House. Biden already has echoed earlier presidents in comparing the experience to living in a “gilded cage.”

So trading the 132-room executive mansion for a less confining, more relaxing weekend hangout can help presidents unwind, said University of Chicago political scientist William Howell.

“What he wanted to be was president,” Howell said. “It is not the White House per se that is the draw.”

The White House defends Biden’s leisure travel at a time when both he and federal health officials have been pleading with the public to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously, including by avoiding unnecessary travel.

“The president lives in Wilmington. It’s his home. That’s where he’s lived for many, many years,” press secretary Jen Psaki said recently. “And as you know, as any president of the United States does, he takes a private airplane called Air Force One to travel there.”

“I think most Americans would also see that as a unique circumstance,” she said of the government aircraft available to Biden.

No president travels alone, though, no matter how private the plane. It requires that lots of other people travel as well. And the costs mount quickly.

Besides the Air Force flight crew, a president’s travel party includes Secret Service agents, White House staff, journalists and family. Depending on the destination and purpose of the trip, lawmakers, Cabinet secretaries or other guests may fly with the president.

Biden occasionally brought some of his six grandchildren on trips when he was vice president, as well as during last year’s presidential campaign.

Presidential travel doesn’t come cheap.

Federal agencies spent an estimated $13.6 million on four trips that then-President Donald Trump took to his waterfront Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, in February and March of 2017, the Government Accountability Office reported in 2019.

The figure includes $10.6 million to operate government aircraft and boats, and $3 million for transportation, lodging, meals and other expenses for government personnel supporting the president on the road, the report said.