In case you hadn’t heard, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump don’t have a ton in common. But they do share at least one highly exclusive and expensive habit: flying thousands of miles most nights on the campaign trail to return to their own homes.
Put kindly, you could say both are creatures of comfort with the available resources to spend nearly night in their own beds and surrounded by their families. However, critics say it’s a huge waste of time and money that just goes to show how out of touch these two are with the very people whose votes they are asking for.
“They should be focused more on talking to voters rather than worrying about how comfortable the bed is that they’re sleeping in,” Lanhee Chen, a former policy advisor for Mitt Romney, told Politico.
Of course, nearly all of us prefer to sleep in our own beds. Not only are they emotionally familiar but there’s science to support the notion that our brains never fully settle down, remaining on alert, when we sleep in a new place.
Trump is even more reluctant to spend a night on the road though he also has the advantage of owning a number of hotels and other properties in locations across the country. Politico says he only spent four nights during all of October away from his home in the Trump Tower or one of his many properties bearing his name.
That may not sound like much, but traditionally presidential candidates spend the majority of their races on the road, crashing on fold-out cots in the homes of supporters or at beast hunkering down at a cheap hotel. In some ways it’s a right of passage before becoming the most powerful person on Earth.
In fact, one of the very rare times that Trump did stay at a place he doesn’t own, Holiday Inn Express in Iowa, the New York Times wrote a story about it.
“Good mattress, staff was great, good mattress, good everything,” Trump told the paper. “It’s different and it’s certainly not Mar-a-Lago. But it’s very nice.”
But before you write off Trump’s habit as another example of him operating outside the norm, remember Clinton really isn’t any different. Politico notes that during the same period she flew back from states including Ohio, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, often arriving after 2am, to crash at her upstate New York farmhouse or her home in Washington, DC.
This raises the question of whether or not either candidate will spend most of their nights in the White House after they’ve won the election. After all, Trump has a new hotel he just opened just blocks away and Clinton still has that luxury Foggy Bottom pad to her name. But even with the most luxurious options available, what person could resist the opportunity to sleep in the same bedroom occupied by some of history’s greatest leaders?
