More than a game: Trump’s golfing life and its political reach

As Donald Trump plays and wins at his own courses, his golf game reveals how sport doubles as a tool of image-making, soft power, and self-enrichment.

On Sunday, 16 March 2025 – as the stock market continued to plummet and as severe storms battered the Midwest and South of the United States, killing dozens of people – Donald Trump announced that he had won another golf tournament at his private club in Florida. 

Despite wasting no time in following through on his campaign promises to dismantle the U.S. government, including firing tens of thousands of federal workers and crippling many agencies that Americans rely on, Trump’s golf game has not suffered since his return to office. His championship win in March marked his sixth weekend trip to Mar-a-Lago for golf outings since the inauguration on January 20 – a habit that is costing taxpayers millions. 

Trump’s claim that he won a golf championship at 78 isn’t exactly surprising. In fact, declaring himself the winner of his own tournament has become something of a dubious tradition. 

In 2023, Trump claimed to have won a club championship despite not playing the opening round. He later told tournament organisers that he played a strong round a couple of days earlier and decided to count that as his score for the club championship. 

That is just one of many stories about Trump’s supposed tournament wins, most of which have been contested by eyewitnesses, caddies, and pros alike. Sportswriter Rick Reilly wrote a New York Times bestselling book on Trump’s legendary cheating habits on the course. 

Nevertheless, Trump has continued to lie and cheat his way to golf championships. His deep love for the game, combined with his relentless drive to win at all costs, offers a revealing glimpse into his character, the values he upholds, and the role of sports as a tool of soft power and diplomacy. 

"You need strength and stamina to WIN, & I have strength & stamina – most others don’t,” he once wrote. “You also need strength & stamina to GOVERN!”

For Trump, golf is not just a pastime but an extension of his influence – an arena where he can assert dominance and bend others to his will. Just as he distorts basic facts in his speeches, his habit of cheating in golf – and getting away with it – mirrors his ability to manipulate reality to serve his own ends.

How Trump built a global golf empire from a college hobby

The 47th U.S. president spends plenty of time on the course, including the 17 he owned around the world at the time of his 2016 presidential campaign. Sixteen-time major champion Jack Nicklaus once claimed that Trump “loves the game of golf more than he loves money.”  

While Trump began teeing off as a college student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, he wouldn’t open his first golf course until 1999, several decades after he assumed control of his family’s real estate business. By then, Trump had already transformed his surname into a brand, honed his skills in the real estate industry, and survived several rounds of bankruptcy. 

In the introduction to his 2005 book ‘The Best Golf Advice I Ever Received’, Trump wrote, "for me and millions of people – men, women, young and old around the world – golf is more than a game. It is a passion".

Trump’s first course, the Trump International Golf Club, was situated in West Palm Beach, Florida. By 2001, the club began hosting Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) events, which is how Trump befriended prominent players like Christie Kerr and Natalie Gulbis, the latter of whom was appointed to Trump’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition in 2018. 

By 2007, Trump owned four courses in the U.S. and was hosting events such as the PGA Tour’s premier WGC-Cadillac Championship at the Trump National Doral Miami. Then in 2008, amid the financial crash that crippled the American economy, Trump began buying up existing golf properties and rebuilding them. 

"What he's been doing is terrific for the game," Nicklaus said of Trump. "He brought a new life during a time when the game was struggling."

Over the next few years, Trump’s collection of golf courses ballooned to 18 golf destinations around the world, including Trump International Golf Club Doonbeg in Ireland, and Trump Turnberry in Scotland, which has hosted four British Opens (one of the major golf events on the annual calendar). The Trump organisation also manages courses in Oman, Indonesia, and Dubai. 

Meanwhile, the PGA Tour and the PGA of America continued to host events at Trump courses. However, that relationship soured during Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 when the tour moved the World Golf Championship out of Trump National Doral and to Mexico City after losing its sponsor, Cadillac. 

This angered Trump, whose views on Mexico were reflected in his response: "They're moving it to Mexico City which, by the way, I hope they have kidnapping insurance,” he said. 

Golf continued to play a significant role in Trump’s life after becoming president in 2016. Though he repeatedly mocked former president Barack Obama for playing golf during his presidency and argued that he wouldn’t have time to play golf, Trump ended up spending far more time on the course than his predecessor had.

However, while golf was embedded into Trump’s character, business, and presidency, it was the consistent reports of cheating that elevated his game to legendary status. 

Cheating on the course is a pattern that mirrors his politics

"Trump doesn’t just cheat at golf. He throws it, boots it, and moves it. He lies about his lies. He fudges and foozles and fluffs. At Winged Foot, 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.'”

This was one of countless memorable passages in sportswriter Rick Reilly’s bestselling book titled ‘Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump’. The book, which documents Trump’s golf antics using witticisms and funny anecdotes, reveals a lot about the incumbent president while making assertions about the dangers of having a pathological liar as the supposed leader of the free world. 

“They said 90% of golfers don’t cheat. Golf is an honest game. but this guy leaves a big ugly orange stain on it. It really pisses me off,” Reilly wrote. 

Reilly, a former Sports Illustrated columnist, has known Trump for more than three decades, having first encountered him during the Pebble Beach Pro-Am in the late 1980s. It was then that he realised that Trump would “cheat you on the course and then buy you lunch.” 

Reilly also revealed in the book that Trump once told him that whenever he opens a new golf course, he plays the first club championship by himself and declares himself to be the champion and puts his name on the wall. That is how he accumulated more than 20 club championships. 

“He just makes it up,” Reilly wrote. 

But what does Trump’s cheating at golf say about his presidency, or the state of U.S. politics, if anything at all? Well, in golf, as in politics, Trump views rules as annoying obstacles to be overcome rather than adhered to. 

Whether it's taking unearned mulligans or enrolling secret service agents and caddies in his golf cons, his actions on the course reveal a blatant disregard for accountability and a reliance on perception over truth. 

This same disregard for norms defined his first presidency, which was marked by two impeachments – the second for attempting to incite an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol – as well as felony convictions, and a web of conflicts of interest, including his refusal to divest from ownership of his family business.

World leaders turn to golf to gain Trump’s ear

During the early days of his first term in office, Trump played a round of golf with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. The two leaders went on to play at least four more times, both in the U.S., as well as in Japan, leading to a close personal relationship between them. 

Abe, who was assassinated in 2022, was skilled at dealing with Trump through golf, understanding that the sport held the key to improved diplomatic relations with a key ally. He gifted him golden golf clubs and even nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize. 

That relationship has now become a blueprint for other stakeholders interested in improving relations with Trump. As South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol prepared to meet with the Trump administration following his electoral victory, his office told media outlets that Yeol “got out his golf clubs for the first time in eight years and resumed his golf practice.”

In March 2025, Finnish President Alexander Stubb spent a day at Mar-a-Lago, securing rare face time with Trump through a seven-hour round of golf. Unlike many European leaders who have struggled to capture Trump’s attention (or his respect), Stubb leveraged his own background as a competitive golfer to capture Trump’s attention and open lines of communication. Away from staff and protocol, the two men touched on Ukraine, U.S. sanctions, and Arctic strategy. 

Days later, Trump publicly floated plans to purchase “a large number” of Finnish icebreakers, a move that could both boost Finland’s defense industry and strengthen its role in U.S. Arctic policy. However, it remains unclear whether Stubb’s golf diplomacy achieved anything more significant, especially when it comes to Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine. 

Trump positions himself at the centre of the PGA–LIV power struggle

Beyond world leaders, Trump’s love of golf has lured some of the most influential figures in the sports and business world. One such figure is Yassir Al-Rumayyan, who heads Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), oversees its oil giant Aramco, and serves as chairman of Premier League club Newcastle United. He is also a board member of the Saudi Olympic Committee and is chairman of the Saudi Golf Federation.

In February 2025, Al-Rumayyan and top PGA Tour officials met with Trump in the Oval Office. The meeting was an attempt to work towards a merger between the two competing tours in men’s professional golf: the PGA Tour and Saudi-funded LIV Golf. 

After years of bitter conflict that saw LIV Golf poach some of the PGA’s top talent and challenge the organisation’s market dominance, the two entities agreed to a merger in 2023. However, that agreement faltered when the U.S. Department of Justice launched an antitrust investigation into the merger. 

In early 2025, the PGA Tour rejected key terms of a proposed 1.5 billion US dollars deal from the Saudis - particularly over LIV Golf’s future status and demands that PIF governor Yassir al-Rumayyan to become co-chairman of PGA Tour Enterprises. This led Trump to offer himself up as a mediator between the two gold entities. 

"We know golf fans are eagerly anticipating a resolution to negotiations with the Public Investment Fund and want to thank President Trump for his interest and long-time support of the game of golf," read the PGA statement published following the meeting. 

"We asked the President to get involved for the good of the game, the good of the country, and for all the countries involved. We are grateful that his leadership has brought us closer to a final deal, paving the way for reunification of men's professional golf."

Yet despite Trump proclaiming that it would take him “the better part of 15 minutes to get the deal done”, it appears as though the agreement is still no closer to being finalised after the Oval Office meeting. Nevertheless, Trump has continued to benefit from his relationship with golf’s leading powers. 

Profiting from the presidency: Hosting LIV golf on his own courses

The U.S. president has played a significant role in the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour. His Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami hosted an event in April 2025, as it did in 2023. That year, Trump courses in Washington, D.C., and Bedminster, New Jersey, also hosted LIV events. 

This is a clear conflict of interest, as Trump has refused to divest from ownership of his family business, including his golf properties, meaning that a sitting U.S. president is set to enrich himself by hosting a golf event funded by a foreign government on American soil. 

It is worth noting that U.S. presidents are exempt from conflict of interest laws that ban federal employees from taking actions that would directly benefit them. However, since the 1970s, US presidents have voluntarily abided by these laws, and put their financial holdings in a blind trust. Trump did not maintain that tradition. 

He was also given “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts,” in a supreme court ruling in 2024, paving the way for Trump to continue working with the Saudi-backed LIV golf without much pushback. 

Trump’s openness to working with the Saudi-backed tour is also partly due to his souring relations with the PGA Tour and the PGA of America, the latter of which administers several of the major tournaments. That conflict reached a head following the January 6 Capitol riots, when the PGA announced it would no longer host the PGA Championships at Trump’s Bedminster course. 

For a while, it seemed as though the very establishment that Trump had worked for decades to join had turned its back on him. In the years that followed, however, Trump was not only able to regain a foothold in the sport but has emerged as a powerbroker between golf’s two vying powers. Trump's renewed presence in golf mirrors his resurgence in combat sports, where he leveraged the UFC to rehabilitate his image after the insurrection.

“When it comes to golf, Trump is the tornado and you are the trailer,” said Reilly.