Q of the Week: What Would You Do in Your Free Time as President?

The Atlantic
Updated

President Trump has reportedly played golf 16 times since taking office—outpacing former President Obama, whose first documented golf outing happened near his 100-day mark. This week, we asked our Politics & Policy Daily readers: If you were president, what would be your preferred leisure activity, and why?

Howard Cohen answered:

Swimming. Unlike many other sports that are taxing on the muscles and bones (especially as we age), swimming is a relaxing, contemplative exercise that allows one to think while immersed under water. Stroke by stroke, lap by lap, it engenders a true cleansing of one’s mind of any and all clutter.

Tam McDonald, chose swimming, too:

I would restore the White House pool, although not for the “fiddling and faddling” that JFK made famous.

Swimming is not only a top aerobic exercise but necessitates a stress-busting breathing rhythm that inspires many of its adherents to characterize it as aquatic yoga. It is good not only for the musculature and respiratory systems but for enhanced cognition: clearer thinking, higher creativity, and enhanced capacity for circumspection.

Another reader, Erin Ham, put it this way: “No one can talk to you or call you in a pool.  It would be a fantastic hour of silence with no technology every day.”

Christopher Round is an avid judo practitioner, which he describes as a “wrestling art that specializes in takedowns.” Round would continue to nurture his hobby in the White House:

I've done it most of my life and would probably ask to have mats put down at the White House. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and I would have the same hobby—perhaps a meeting on the mat would take down his tough-guy image. (See what I did there?)

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