Back when he was a part-time television actor with nothing but time on his hands, Donald Trump would routinely complain about how often Barack Obama played golf. “@BarackObama plays golf to escape work while America goes down the drain,” he groused back in 2011, one of the 27 tweets he authored specifically on the topic of his predecessor’s golf habit. Upon becoming president, Trump promptly went about surpassing Obama’s record: as of July 16, 2018, Trump has spent 170 out of 543 days staying at his own properties, and on May 28, 2018, he topped his 102nd golf trip, less than 500 days into his administration—a milestone it took Obama more than 1,200 days to hit. More surprising, Trump seems acutely self-aware of this hypocrisy. The White House frequently insists that Trump is spending his vacations working hard for America, at times berating reporters who characterize his trips as “low-key,” even as golfers post videos of Trump putting about the green, and Trump’s own golfing buddies openly contradict the White House’s account. Indeed, the president typically goes out of his way to look busy when he indulges in these continual vacations, aggressively tweeting about how he is “working hard” and taking meetings. (A preview of his schedule this week at his Bedminster, New Jersey, resort suggests his only planned events are two dinners with supporters, a dinner with “business leaders,” and a single roundtable with lawmakers to discuss prison reform.)

These “working vacations” have historically created trouble for the White House. Without the typical presidential duties to occupy him, Trump has used his vacation time to kick off several scandals and conspiracy theories. It was at Mar-a-Lago that Trump baselessly accused Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower before the election; several months later, Trump was again at his private Palm Beach club when he called on the F.B.I. to investigate Hillary Clinton. It was in Bedminster, in between daily rounds of golf, that Trump threatened to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea and sparked an international crisis.

A year later, however, his aides seems resigned to indulging the president’s habits. White House staff tell Axios that rather than trying to force Trump to conform to the norms of presidential decorum and discretion, or to prevent him from spilling state secrets before dining-room guests—an effort reportedly spearheaded by John Kelly during his first few months as chief of staff—aides now mostly leave Trump alone, allowing him to do as he pleases. Besides his “working” lunches and dinners, Jonathan Swan reports, the president will be free to enjoy what White House officials describe as “Executive Time.”

These vacations can be a nightmare for the already over-extended Secret Service. As with Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Bedminster resort is not closed to members while Trump is staying there. Instead, Trump typically mingles with paying guests, giving anyone with the money for the initiation fee—reportedly anywhere from $75,000 to $300,000, plus annual dues in the range of $22,000—invaluable access to the president. (Though Trump reportedly resides in a private cottage on the Bedminster premises, according to Swan, he “likes to drop into the clubhouse to dine with the members on a big upstairs terrace overlooking the golf course.”) The result is a potential bonanza for businessmen, lobbyists, and even spies. “People in a swimming pool all day, 15 yards from POTUS’s house,” a source told Axios, reflecting on the security challenge.

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.