Viral videos of Donald Trump cheating at golf are hilarious - and telling
Those videos of Donald Trump blatantly cheating at golf on one of his own courses? They are not isolated incidents.
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Think of Donald Trump’s second presidency, so far, as a par 5 hole at one of his more beloved golf courses. Heck, let’s get specific and say Turnberry. He was there just this week, and Scotland’s weather offers the appropriate level of bluster.
Shot one (the early weeks): a clean drive, albeit one shaped with a fade far, far, faaaaaaaaaaaar to the right. Mr Trump strides confidently, even cockily, down the fairway. He is, by all accounts, pretty damn good off the tee.
Shot two (the vacillating tariff policies): looking to lay up near the green, Mr Trump sends his first attempt skewing off into the trees. He takes a mulligan. Then another. Then another. Until finally, we get a ball on the fringe of the fairway, and the markets calm down.
Shot three (immigration enforcement): a relatively easy shot, here. Most Americans support the deportation of criminals. But ....... oh no. He’s overhit the darned thing, depriving people of their basic rights and chucking US citizens into detention. It sails over the green and yes, into a bunker. Nobody wants that. Such a pity.
Shot four (the Big, Beautiful Bill): though it appears to defy physics, Mr Trump somehow manages to hit the ball backwards out of the bunker, ending up further away from the green than before. Tortured metaphor for his ballooning of America’s national debt, there.
Shot five (the Epstein files): a palpably frustrated Mr Trump hacks at the ball and sends it ricocheting into his own caddy’s face, infuriating the very person whose tireless support got him to this position in the first place.
At this point Mr Trump picks up his ball, hops on his golf cart and speeds to the next hole, saying, “Wow! An eagle!” And his entourage, ever obedient, applauds. “Great shot, sir!”
Bit of a caricature, maybe, of Mr Trump’s politics. But not of his golfing habits. The videos that went viral this week from his trip to Scotland, which showed him cheating quite blatantly, represent a single grain in the sand of a truly cavernous bunker.
The man is a chronic, prodigious, shameless cheater, as we shall explore below.
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Mr Trump’s golfing occupies a peculiar space in what we might call, with rolling eyes, the “discourse”. Obviously, it doesn’t matter. You won’t find a single voter who cares whether the guy shot a 71 or a 95 on Saturday. And yet it’s illustrative. His serial cheating on the links speaks to something deeply embedded in his character, something that does matter.
Here’s the fundamental question. Donald Trump is, genuinely, a good golfer. Everyone who knows the sport, and has either played with him or caddied for him, acknowledges that. Look at this drive!
He has a great handicap, even by the standards of someone who plays so often. Most experts who’ve observed him put it at 10, or maybe a touch lower. That’s impressive! And at the age of 79, no less. (Mr Trump himself insists his handicap is, preposterously, below 3, which is equivalent to claiming Madagascar is in the Atlantic.)
Why then, does he cheat so brazenly, and so relentlessly? He doesn’t need to! Therein lies the great mystery.
“And how can he be so shameless as to cheat right in front of people?” sportswriter Rick Reilly wondered in his 2019 book on the matter, Commander in Cheat, a tome long on my to-read list, which I finally found an excuse to inhale after this week’s videos.
“They call him on it, but he just shrugs and cheats some more. It’s ruined his reputation in the golf world. Ninety per cent of the people I interviewed – on and off the record – say he openly cheats. A lot of them said they stopped playing with him because of it.
“So why? Why cheat? Why lie? Why exaggerate his handicap, his scores, his club championships?”
(Mr Trump claims to have won almost 20 golf championships, all but two of which are so baseless as to be deemed laughable by Mr Reilly. And those other two are dubious as well. More than once, the President has demanded to be named the winner of a tournament even though he was in a different state when it was held.)
The book includes a frequently hilarious collection of anecdotes from people who have witnessed Mr Trump’s behaviour.
You’re struck by how brazen it all is. Everybody knows he’s doing it. Everybody. No one is even remotely fooled. It’s a decades-long running joke.
The footage from Scotland shows a couple of examples. In one clip, a caddy surreptitiously drops a ball for Mr Trump just off the fairway – his actual shot having landed, presumably, in much dicier territory. Mr Trump drives up in his cart, which was trailing close behind, and approaches it as though nothing unusual has happened. Just a routine bit of skulduggery.
In a second clip, Mr Trump drives up to a spot where there is no ball at all. He pretends to wipe away some stray grass, simultaneously drops a ball there, and then plays it, as though it had been sitting there the whole time.
According to the stories Mr Reilly gathered, this is typical Trump conduct.
A quote from women’s golf professional Suzann Pettersen, who actually gets along reasonably well with Mr Trump: “No matter how far into the woods he hits the ball, it’s in the middle of the fairway when we get there.”
A man named Bill Rayburn, who caddied for Mr Trump once at “a celebrity” event: “Even with a gallery, marshals and me standing there, he openly cheated at least 10 times. I stopped counting around the 15th hole.”
NBA coach Doc Rivers, boxer Oscar De La Hoya and musician Alice Cooper are also among those who expressed their incredulity at Mr Trump’s cheating. I could cite a dozen more from the book at least.
In casual golf there’s something called a “gimme”. It’s when your opponent acknowledges you will almost certainly make a putt, and just gives you the shot without making you play it.
That’s something your partner gives to you. Mr Trump calls gimmes for himself, not just for short putts, but sometimes for mid-range or long putts too. He’s been known to grant himself gimmes for chip-ins, meaning the ball isn’t even on the green.
“Did you just take a gimme chip-in?” asked one witness to this nonsense, Mr Reilly himself, during a round with Mr Trump.
“By the time I got my jaw refastened, he was driving off in the cart,” he recounts.
Part of a chapter in the book is devoted to classifying Mr Trump’s various cheeky tactics. Mr Reilly dubs one “the invisible dunk”.
“This one time, I was in the fairway and he was right of the green, but a little bit down the hill,” one “frequent guest in Trump’s” playing groups told the writer.
“He didn’t think anybody was watching, but I was. I saw him make a chipping motion from the side of the hill, but no ball came up.
“Then he walked up the hill, stuck his hand into the hole and pulled a ball out. It must have been a ball he had in his hand the whole time. Then he looks up and yells, ‘I chipped it in!’ I mean, who does that?”
Another tale, here, from probably Mr Trump’s favourite course, his own one in New Jersey.
“People like to tell about the time Trump hit one in the pond. Everybody saw it splash a good 30 feet from shore,” says Mr Reilly.
“When the group got up to the pond, the caddy says, ‘Boss, your ball is right here.’ It was sitting safely on the grass.
“Someone in the group yelled at the caddy: ‘What did you do with your mask and flippers?’”
Buy the book if you want more of these anecdotes. They are plentiful.
The impression you have is of a man who will do anything possible, no matter how dodgy or brazen, to help him shoot a better score.
And of a man who has precisely zero shame. I would like to think that most of us, having shanked a ball in front of multiple witnesses, would laugh about it and play on. Not this guy. He insists the shot was perfect, whatever your lying eyes tell you, and then shoots his next from the fairway, and then brags about making a birdie.
But wait! That is not the end of his chicanery. Mr Trump is also notorious for fudging his scores, and for claiming titles he could not possibly have won.
Mr Reilly recounts a day on which Mr Trump entered the clubhouse at a respected course, claiming to have shot a very impressive 68. He spent some time hobnobbing and boasting about the score, then left.
The club’s head pro summoned the caddies from Mr Trump’s group into his office.
“Mr Trump said he shot a 68 here today. Is that true?” the pro asked.
The caddies’ responses were, in turn, “no way” and “no f***ing way”. At best, they said, Mr Trump had shot a 79. Probably worse, but the sheer volume of cheating made it hard to tell.
“There was so much trickery and fraud, it was impossible to know what he’d really shot,” writes Mr Reilly.
“The 68, they said, came with tosses, kicks, and golf balls getting free rides back to the short grass. It came with do-overs, takeovers, and floating mulligans. It came with very little sound of plastic balls actually going into little plastic cups.”
The book starts with a relevant, if clichéd, quote from the English author P.G. Wodehouse (whose full, far more amusing name was Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse): “To find a man’s true character, play golf with him.”
It sounds glib, even stupid, but ... yeah, actually. Sport is psychological. That is why it’s more compelling than most scripted dramas.
When a man is petty enough to rig a casual game of golf in his favour, and to do it as a matter of habit, year after year, you do start to consider how he approaches other aspects of life. The law, for example. The treatment of his tax affairs. The treatment of other human beings, outside the clubhouse.
“Trump doesn’t just cheat at golf. He cheats like a three-card Monte dealer,” says Mr Reilly.
“He throws it, boots it, and moves it. He lies about his lies. He fudges and foozles and fluffs. At Winged Foot (a golf course where Trump is a member), the caddies got so used to seeing him kick his ball back onto the fairway they came up with a nickname for him: ‘Pele’.”
One more story, because I’m sorry, but they’re really very amusing.
One of Trump’s playing partners, NFL commentator Mike Tirico was competing with him on a par 5, and hit “the 3-wood of his life”.
“The thing had the flag covered from the start. It crested the hill perfectly, and was going to be tight to the pin,” says Mr Reilly.
“Shocked at his sudden skill, Tirico high-fived his caddie and strode towards the green, his shoes barely touching the grass.
“But somehow, when they got there, the ball wasn’t near the pin. It wasn’t even on the green. It was 50 feet left of the pin, in the bunker. Unless it hit a drone and ricocheted sideways, there was no physical way it could have ended up there.”
Mr Trump’s reaction to this was to tell Mr Tirico “lousy break”. Later, the future president’s caddy came up to the commentator.
“You know that shot you hit on the par 5? It was about ten feet from the hole. Trump threw it into the bunker. I watched him do it,” the caddy said.
Funny and pathetic, in equal measure. And another data point in our continuing, ever-grimmer assessment of Donald Trump’s character.
Originally published as Viral videos of Donald Trump cheating at golf are hilarious - and telling
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