National leaders dealing with national emergencies often have places where they can “get away from it all.” Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, had a secret subterranean complex located in London. From this nerve center, he directed his country’s war effort. Much of the complex is now a museum.

His German counterpart, the unlamented Adolph Hitler, had several getaways. Among the more notable is the Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle’s Nest) located high in the Bavarian Alps overlooking Berchtesgaden. The surviving portions of Martin Borman’s gift to Herr Hitler are now part of a restaurant.

The war on the eastern front was largely directed from the Wolfschanze (Wolf’s Lair) located in a forest in what is now Poland. Blown up by retreating German forces in 1945, and further demolished by Russian forces, the Wolfschanze is today a moss-covered collection of massive concrete structures slowly being overtaken by the surrounding forest, although there is talk of turning the site into a tourist attraction.

The final getaway was the Fuhrerbunker, located near the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. From this underground command center, an increasingly delusional Hitler issued desperate orders to non-existing military forces in a doomed attempt to stave off Soviet forces encircling the capital of the “Thousand Year Reich.” It was here that most historians believe Hitler took his own life.

It is fitting that this final getaway of the most hated regime in human history is now the site of something as prosaic as a parking lot.

The United States has had, and still has, its own hideaways. The most famous of the known locations is a Cold War-era subterranean complex located under the Greenbrier resort hotel in the West Virginia mountains near White Sulphur Springs. Hardened against nuclear attack, the Greenbrier facility was designed to house up to one thousand people, among whom would be the members of the United States Congress. They could be there for an extended period, and from there, the United States government would continue to function in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Dirt from the excavation reportedly was used to build a golf course and facilitate construction of an airport runway.  It was decommissioned in 1992 and is now open for public and private “Bunker Tours” most days of the year.

All of these “command and control” facilities reflect the gravity of the national emergencies that caused them to be built.

Last week, in the White House Rose Garden, our president declared his very own national emergency, apparently to free up cash that, for over two years, the Congress had previously balked at giving him, in order to build a barrier of some variety on the southern border with Mexico. Of course, the original promise, made during the 2016 presidential campaign, was that the wall would be paid for by Mexico – not by American taxpayers from funds filched from other previously approved and appropriated government projects, projects that reportedly included a middle school in Kentucky.

As national emergencies go, the immediacy and degree of the threat seemed diminished when our president said he really didn’t have to declare a national emergency at all but did so to move his wall project along faster – to be done in time for the 2020 presidential campaign.

Having exercised what, in his own mind, he believes he has the power to do, our president scurried off to his own favorite place to get away from it all. Not for him the moldy damp walls of subterranean bastions or the isolation of mountaintop aeries. He was off to his favorite golf resort, Mar-a-Lago.

When you consider the gravity of the circumstances that compelled national leaders, both heroes and villains, to go to extraordinary lengths to help manage their respective national emergencies, a national emergency that the president believes can by managed from a golf course causes one to suspect the national emergency is not much of a national emergency after all.

And probably never should have been labelled as one in the first place.