On his YouTube channel Bryson DeChambeau hosts a series called Breaking 50 in which the Major winner pairs up with other pros or celebrity golfers for a kooky round of golf.
In the professional game, breaking 60 is an extremely rare feat that DeChambeau achieved on the LIV tour this year; in contrast, breaking 50 has no status in fact or fiction.
In a triumph of central casting Donald Trump appeared recently as one of DeChambeau’s co-stars. For the purpose of their daredevil ascent to this phantom summit, the rules of golf were bent like a hairpin.
To make the holes as short as possible they played from the women’s tees at Bedminster – a Trump-owned course in New York – and the format was a better-ball scramble which meant that Trump played most of his shots from wherever DeChambeau’s ball had landed.
For comic value, it rivalled Caddyshack. Trump was a pastiche of Ty Webb, the Chevy Chase character. DeChambeau, a long-standing brand ambassador for Trump’s portfolio of golf resorts, set a new course record for obsequiousness.
At one point, after the former president had hit a vanilla 200-yard drive down the fairway, the two-time US Open winner turned to him and declared, in awe, “You’re a driving machine”.
The 12th hole had been boiled down to a farcically dinky 210-yard par 4. For DeChambeau, it was a comfortable 7-iron; for Trump it was a flat-out smack of his driver that, miraculously, finished four feet from the pin.
“This is one of the greatest golf shots I’ve seen in a long time,” gushed DeChambeau, the champion lickspittle. Trump was not surprised.
In a fearless piece of editing, though, the former president was shown fatting a couple shots from the middle of the fairway and running scared of a chip from a tight lie, 30 yards from the green, reaching for his putter instead. On the greens he held the putter like he was grappling with the head of a snake and made a stroke like he was chopping carrots; apart from all that, it was elegant.
In one of their chatty interludes in the golf cart, DeChambeau asked Trump what he liked about golf. The convicted felon answered with time-honoured braggadocio.
“I play it well for a guy that plays as little as I do,” he said. “I’ve won so many club championships. I play against guys that play all the time. But I’m straight. I hit it on to the green. I putt well. And a lot of guys don’t.”
Trump’s outlandish claims about how many club championships he has won is an established trope of his narcissism. By the time Rick Reilly wrote Commander in Cheat, his hilarious and stunning exposé of golf’s greatest charlatan, Trump had laid a spurious claim to 18 club championships. In a forensic chapter, Reilly exploded 16 of these claims; the other two were unconfirmed.
It didn’t matter. For Trump, the truth is a like a single use wooden tee, decapitated on impact. In the five years since Reilly’s book was published Trump has continued to make these groundless boasts. Last year he claimed to have won the club championship at Bedminster, the course he played with DeChambeau, shooting a staggering 67 in the process.
The club had hosted a LIV Golf event a couple of weeks earlier in which only six of the 144 rounds played by seasoned professionals had been better than 67.
Earlier this year he posted on Truth Social that he had won the club championship and the senior club championship at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach – the first golf club he opened, 25 years ago. Jack Nicklaus was on hand to present the 77-year-old former president with the Most Improved Player award. After all the extraordinary things Trump had achieved in golf he had found room for improvement. Incredible.
Nicklaus is one of the few establishment figures in golf who has anything to do with Trump now. His enthusiastic endorsement of Trump just before polling day in 2020 – prompted by a call from vice-president Mike Pence – stained Nicklaus’s reputation, irredeemably.
A year earlier, according to Politico, Trump had steered $20 million in state funding toward a mobile children’s hospital project championed by Nicklaus, after the 18-time Major winner had lobbied Trump for assistance. His election endorsement was payback. In April of last year, at the Masters, Nicklaus said he wouldn’t rule out supporting Trump again.
In recent years Trump’s relationship with golf’s seats of power, though, have been strained beyond breaking point. Bedminster was scheduled to host the 2022 PGA Championship – one of golf’s four Majors – but the PGA of America performed a sharp U-turn after the January 2021 riots on Capitol Hill.
Turnberry in Scotland, one of the greatest links courses in the world, has not staged the Open since Trump bought the club 10 years ago.
“Until we’re confident that any coverage at Turnberry would be about golf, about the golf course and about the championship, we will not return any of our championships there,” said the Royal and Ancient, 13 months ago. In other words: not so long as Trump is the owner.
Trump said last year that the DP World Tour was interested in staging the Irish Open at Doonbeg, the links course he owns in Clare, but no such interest has been declared. None of Trump’s 11 courses in America has hosted a PGA Tour event since 2016. That relationship ended during his first election campaign and has not been rekindled. The PGA Tour denied that the decision was a “political exercise”.
The put upon European Seniors Tour has played events at Trump’s course in Aberdeen in recent years – despite the acts of environmental vandalism that Trump has committed on the site, infuriating locals and the Scottish government. But his only consequential allies in professional golf now are the Saudis.
Over the last three years, six LIV Golf events have been played on Trump courses in America and the Saudis have also invested in a course that Trump is building in Oman, forking out an initial payment of $5.4 million for a licensing fee.
Are Trump’s golf resorts a financial success? That depends on what you believe. Trump valued each of his golf courses at $50 million in the financial disclosure he was obliged to make as a presidential candidate in 2016. Experts in that market regarded those figures as preposterous and reckoned that the best of Trump’s courses would fetch over $20 million but substantially less than $30 million.
An investigation in 2020 by the New York Times concluded that Trump’s golf courses had lost a total of $315 million over the previous 20 years. But further reporting by the New York Times this year revealed that profits had surged at several of Trump’s courses, according to figures lodged in court filings. Joining fees at two of Trump’s courses in Florida have reportedly jumped to as much as $400,000.
Trump’s passion for the game, though, has never diminished. It was a convenient vector for some of the sensations he craves most: winning, bragging, cheating.
At Winged Foot, the only golf club membership Trump holds outside of the clubs he owns, the caddies became so accustomed to seeing him kick his ball out of the rough that they nicknamed him “Pele”.
In Reilly’s book, Mike Tirico, a TV sports presenter, tells a story of playing with Trump when the former president threw Tirico’s ball into a bunker. After a brilliant second shot on a par-5, Tirico thought he had an eagle putt and couldn’t understand how his ball had ended up in the sand. After the round, Trump’s caddie came clean; the former president had driven ahead in his golf cart and committed an act of casual sabotage.
“No president has been as up to his clavicles in golf as Donald Trump,” wrote Reilly. “None has been woven so deeply into the world of golf. Trump doesn’t just play courses; he builds them, buys them, owns them, operates them, sues over them, lies about them, bullies with them and brags about them.”
Before he was elected in 2016, Trump repeatedly taunted Barack Obama for how much golf he played while he was in the White House.
“I think he’s played 300 rounds of golf, or something like that,” Trump said. “That’s more than many members of the PGA Tour. [In office] I’m not going to have time to play golf.”
On his third weekend in office Trump travelled to Mar-a-Lago, his luxury bolt-hole in Florida, and played golf on Saturday and Sunday. On the next two weekends he followed the same schedule.
The Washington Post scrupulously logged Trump’s daily movements while he was president and they concluded that he had played 261 rounds of golf while he was in the White House, an average of one game every 5.6 days. During two terms in the White House Obama had played 333 rounds of golf, an average of once every 8.8 days.
Anyway, was it such a bad thing? How much trouble could Trump cause in the world while he was playing golf?
In their YouTube romp Trump and DeChambeau shot 50, failing to live up to the title of the series.
“This will be your lowest score, right?” said the former president to the US Open champion. DeChambeau couldn’t come straight out with the whole truth but he couldn’t lie. Earlier in the series he had already shot 50 with an influencer dude that Trump had never heard of.
You should have seen his face.
