The nuclear missile strike that wasn’t this past weekend brought to mind something I’ve yapped about for the past several years.

It is that presidents of the United States are never “off the clock.” They’re never more than a phone call — or a text message — away from being summoned immediately back to work.

Case in point: When the president was informed that Hawaii residents were panicking over what they thought was an incoming ballistic missile, he was on the golf course. He was playing golf at his resort in south Florida.

The “missile strike” turned out to be a false alarm caused by human error.

Donald J. Trump, though, was summoned by national security aides to tend to the issue immediately. He was called off the golf course and hustled to wherever he went to stand by and to monitor the situation.

Back when Barack Obama was president, Trump and other critics yammered constantly about all the time Obama was spending on the golf course. I countered through this blog that the criticism was unfounded, unjustified and undeserved. I made the point that presidents are on call 24/7. They’re always on the job. They cannot hand it off to someone else.

I’ll say the same thing with Trump in charge. Never mind that he plays more golf than Obama; that’s not the point here.

My point is that any criticism of Trump playing golf while Americans were scrambling for cover in response to a false alarm ignores a fundamental point: Presidents of the United States are not entitled to a single minute as private citizens. They aren’t.

They have to respond to any real or potential emergency — even when they’re playing golf.