Trump and golf – striking balls and deals over 18 holes

Mick Mulvaney thought he had beaten Donald Trump. The president and his White House chief of staff were playing golf at Trump’s Bedminster club in 2019, and Mulvaney was up by one stroke with three holes left.

“I slapped him on the shoulder and joked with him, ‘I got you today, old man,'” Mulvaney told the BBC. “He looked at me, half smiled, half-sneered and just laughed.”

The president birdied two of the next three holes and beat Mulvaney by two.

Mulvaney, who worked in Trump’s White House for three years in his first term, says he played golf with, or in the group just behind, the president around 40 times and never beat the man 21 years his elder. “Just soul-crushing” is how he described it.

Golf has been a popular activity for many modern American presidents, but none has had quite the same relationship with the sport as Trump, who is in Scotland this weekend for the opening of a new Trump course near Balmedie in Aberdeenshire.

For presidents like Barack Obama and George W Bush, golf seemed to serve as a diversion from the burdens of office. For the current president, however, golf is a business venture, a networking opportunity and – as Mulvaney recounts – a fiercely competitive undertaking. On the fairways and greens, he says, the president is focused on the game and has little tolerance for poor shots or slow play.

“In fact, if you are slow,” Mulvaney said, “you aren’t going to get invited back and might get left behind on the course.”

British golf journalist Kevin Brown experienced that first-hand when he played with Trump on his Balmedie course in 2012. He said he was taking in the scenery on the second hole, when one of the other players in his foursome told him that Trump had asked if he could “get a move on”.

“He was more focused, head down, motoring on ahead of us,” Brown said. “Most of the time, he was just playing his own game and obviously thinking about stuff he had to do.”

After the round, however, Brown spoke to Trump for nearly an hour about his connection to golf. He said the future president’s passion was clear.

“He’s nuts about golf,” he said. “He knew the background and history of the game. It was impressive.”

Trump, a real-estate developer turned politician, has played golf since his college days and bought his first golf property, Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach Florida, in 1999. Trump Golf currently owns 11 courses in the US and three in the UK, manages several others and has plans for new resorts in Oman, Indonesia, Vietnam and Qatar.

Golf clubs are a prized possession for Trump – and not always a profit-making one. According to filings with the British government, Trump’s Balmedie course lost $1.83m (£1.35m) in 2023 – its 11th-straight year running a deficit. Turnberry, on the other hand, reported about $5m in profit.

Trump has at times clashed with local authorities over land use and sought to restrict construction of wind turbines off the coast of his Balmedie property.

While his US courses have hosted major professional tournaments, he has long wanted Turnberry, which he will visit this weekend, to be the site of a future British Open Championship. The historic course has hosted four of the prestigious competitions, but none since Trump purchased the property in 2014.

According to Brown, Trump is drawn to high-profile golf properties because of the prestige they provide.

“He just likes the quality and the pedigree,” he said. “It’s about attracting the right people – i.e. filthy rich businessmen with pretty deep pockets.”

A single round of golf at Turnberry, for instance, costs around $1,350.

Golf has long been an avocation enjoyed by the elite, where the wealthy and the powerful could conduct business and make connections in an exclusive – and, until recently in many cases exclusively white and male – environment.

For businessman Trump, it was a pathway to the kind of connections helpful to building his real estate empire. It has offered him a means to connect with American politicians and foreign leaders – even if he did promise in 2016 that he was “not going to have time to play golf” if he was ever voted into White House.

Early in his first presidential term, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gifted Trump a golden golf club. The two would later play five rounds together – forging a friendship that lasted until Abe was assassinated in 2022.

Trump’s regular golf partners have included close political allies, like South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, and Republicans with whom he sought to forge new connections, such as 2016 presidential rival Rand Paul of Kentucky.

“He’s a little better golfer than I am, admittedly, but we had a good time,” Paul said after a 2017 round with the president, adding that the two mostly focused on golf – but also discussed Trump’s tax policies.

In March of this year, Trump golfed with Finnish President Alexander Stubb in West Palm Beach, partnering in a club tournament Trump said the two men won. Stubb would later say that they talked about the war in Ukraine, Russia and global security.

“In Finnish history, it’s quite rare that the Finnish president has spent so much time with the president of the United States, either physically or on the phone or messaging,” Stubb told Canadian broadcaster CBC News.

It’s this kind of access, and influence, that has made a tee time with Trump a coveted prize for those seeking a presidential audience.

“Anybody who is sophisticated dealing with Donald quickly understands that everything about him is transactional,” said Professor David Cay Johnston of Rochester Institute of Technology, who as a reporter covered Trump for decades and has written three books about the man.

“If you’re the head of a company or the head of a nation, you either try and minimise any prospective damage he might do to you by buttering him up or to size him up on something if you’re unsure.”

Even back at the White House, foreign leaders have tried to parlay a golf connection into a friendly reception. When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the Oval Office in May, he gave the president an illustrated South African golf book and included golf professionals Ernie Els and Retief Goosen in his national delegation.

That didn’t help much, however, as the meeting devolved into an extended confrontation over South African land confiscation policies.

While that drama played out in front of the gathered press and live television cameras, Trump may see benefit from his more cloistered golf outings, as it gives him an opportunity for meetings well removed from the prying eyes of journalists.

Reporters accompany Trump on all of his public movements, but when the president is on the golf course they are kept well away.

“He has time out of the eye of anybody else to deal with people,” Johnston said. “And of course, those heads of corporations or states, similarly, are going to use the opportunity to be away from any spotlight.”

The president’s penchant for privacy on the links also means there are wildly conflicting accounts of how good a golfer Trump really is. He boasts of winning dozens of club championships – all on courses he owns – including five this year alone.

Sports journalist Rick Reilly, in his 2019 book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, writes that Trump’s championship claims are so “over-the-top” that he loses all credibility.

He details what he says is Trump’s penchant for cheating, including moving his ball to better spots on the course and taking multiple mulligans – a custom in which a player is allowed to replay a stroke with no penalty, after a mishit.

“He’s a notorious cheat,” Johnston said. “I spoke to someone once who played a round of golf with him, who told me that he had taken six mulligans on a single hole.”

According to Mulvaney, who says he never saw Trump cheat, the president may use golf as a way to connect, but 18 holes with the president isn’t about business or government or politics.

“This is golf,” he said. “And while that sounds obtuse, golfers know what I mean. Trump was a golfing enthusiast long before he was president. And he will be long after, as well.”