After 200 resort trips, will Trump visit troops?

Maybe now, two years into the job and after the midterm elections, President Donald Trump will visit American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

President George W. Bush traveled four times to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan.

As our level of involvement in those two wars shifted, Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama, visited Iraq once (he’d also been there once as a senator) and Afghanistan four times. Donald Trump?

Not once.

I mention this because the current president remains weirdly obsessed with Obama (and anyone else who has held the job.)

A few days ago, preparing for a rally in Montana, Trump tweeted:

Landing in Montana now — at least everybody admits that my lines and crowds are far bigger than Barack Obama’s...

Since becoming president, Trump has staged campaign rallies more than 60 times. Sixty.

He has traveled more than 200 times to properties that he owns.

That’s roughly 30 percent of his time as president.

More than 150 of those excursions were to golf properties.

The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch estimated that Trump’s travel during his first year alone cost taxpayers $13 million.

At his rallies, the president is all tough talk and bluster and he seems to hardly finish one self-aggrandizing trip before boarding a plane and heading to another.

But Trump — unlike Bush, unlike Obama — has never been to visit our troops in a war zone.

Two years, and not once.

Bush visited the troops within a year of initiating the war in Iraq.

Obama was there about three months after becoming president.

Unlike a rally staged in the United States for purely political purposes, visiting troops in the field isn’t about the president.

Or shouldn’t be.

It still will get him attention, but the emphasis is on the men and women in uniform. The idea is to use the platform of the commander in chief to remind the rest of us that we have fellow citizens serving in the field. Trump hasn’t done that yet. And when he does, when Trump finally chooses to visit deployed troops, I fear the president won’t be leaving the country but only heading to our side of the U.S. border, where he has set the stage to wage a war against a ragtag mass of weary, hungry men women and children seeking asylum.

And even then, when Trump finally goes to a place that he — if no one else — declares a “war zone,” I suspect his visit won’t be about the troops, but about him.