President Trump is trying to fight the confines of the presidential bubble.
Less than a month after taking office, Trump, a man who loathes boredom and has a penchant for doing things his way, is trying his best to keep things the way they were before he won the presidency.
He tweets what’s on his mind. He has refused to give up his unsecured Android phone. And he flies to the warmth of his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, on the weekends — just like old times.
Presidents and first families often bristle as they feel the White House walls closing in on them under a constant media spotlight and vast security detail.
Trump, arguably even more than his predecessors, has had difficulty giving up his past life.
{mosads}Friends note that the billionaire already had a luxurious penthouse in the world famous skyscraper that carries his name. He has a nicer plane than Air Force One. And he even owns his own $7 million chopper.
After Trump was elected, Christopher Ruddy, the CEO of Newsmax media and a friend of the president’s who speaks to him often, heard through the grapevine that Trump wouldn’t return to Mar-a-Lago until Easter.
That didn’t turn out to be true — which was no surprise to Ruddy.
“I thought, ‘Yeah right,’” Ruddy said in an interview. “He’s not going to like Washington … He’s not a Washington guy.”
Trump left Washington Friday to head to Mar-a-Lago with a new friend — Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
It’s the second weekend in a row that Trump will spend at his Florida residence.
In the winter, Ruddy said Trump prefers to be in Florida, where it is warm, where he has plenty of friends and where he can play golf to unwind.
“He’s been going [to Mar-a-Lago] for almost 30 years,” Ruddy said. “It’s just part of his life.”
His daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, have relocated to Washington, D.C. to be close to the president. His wife, Melania, has stayed in New York, where the couple’s young son is in school.
Sources predict Trump will be reluctant to change his life to fit into the White House perimeters.
“Washington thinks the presidency is going to change him, and I’m telling you the presidency is going to be changed by him,” one Trump associate familiar with the president’s thinking said. “He doesn’t know or care to know how Washington thinks is the proper way to do things.”
The associate said while Trump has a fondness for the history of the White House, he ultimately sees it “as a place to work. Not so much a place to live.”
“It’s the world’s nicest prison,” the associate said. “It’s all-confining.”
Twitter is one way for the president to connect to the outside world.
Each day Trump types out 140-character, free-wheeling missives on everything from his immigration ban to his daughter’s severed ties with Nordstrom to the ratings for “Celebrity Apprentice.”
The tweets have caused problems for the president.
On Thursday, after Trump tweeted that Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) had misrepresented what Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch had told him in a meeting, it put him at odds with White House staffers who were in the room with him.
“Someone needs to tell him that all these extemporaneous comments are probably not in the best interest of his larger message,” one Republican consultant said. “He can’t just say whatever is on his mind. It’s pushing the limits too much.”
Sometimes the tweets are revealing.
Trump’s tweets often reflect his penchant for watching cable news. A story will appear on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” and minutes later there will be a related Trump tweet.
Jeffrey Lord, a Trump supporter who also served in the Reagan White House, suspects the president won’t change much of the way he’s doing business because he thinks it’s working for him.
In fact, he suspects Trump may begin doing more rallies, a throwback to the campaign and another means of breaking loose of Washington.
“This is his way of staying in touch with the real world and his way of dealing with [the bubble],” Lord said. “This bubble business is a hard thing to deal with when you’re president, so you make a conscious effort to make it not ruin your life.”
Ruddy himself wondered how his friend with no political experience or friends in Washington would adjust to life in the White House.
But last week, while he was chatting with Melania while the Trumps were in town for the weekend, the first lady told him that Trump “really loves the place.”
“He’s going to break the bubble,” Ruddy says. “He’s going to burst it.”