On Friday, a family member of President Donald Trump asserted that, despite his brags of excellence and decades of practice, he's really bad at what he loves most: golf.
This is according to his niece Mary L. Trump, who took to social media to share her thoughts in the wake of her president uncle’s claims of having won his 43rd golf championship last weekend. As she notes, the supposed victory occurred at his own golf club in New Jersey, and many have suggested that he seems to score suspiciously well as long as he’s playing on a course he owns. Because of this, commentators suggest he cheats.
“Why wouldn’t we believe it when he can hit golf shots like these?” teased Mary Trump before rolling an embarrassing series of clips showing the president’s golf gaffes. “I know what a good golf game looks like and Donald does not have it.”
A frequent critic of her uncle, she went on to explain, “If there’s one thing I would potentially feel bad for Donald about — and of course, I wouldn’t because he’s a horrible human — it is the fact that he spends probably 80 percent of his waking life playing golf, and he’s been doing that for over six decades," and he’s still bad at it.
After the 80-year-old president claimed to win last weekend, he declared, “It's called TALENT, and I have it, and they don't! I won with a score of 70, and am so honored in that, unlike the rest of the field, I'm given very little time to practice, because I'm focused on many other things.” Shortly after that, a video emerged that appeared to show Trump’s caddie helping him cheat by dropping a ball on the green to replace one hit into the rough. In response, one of his biographers declared, “Trump pays his caddies to give him fake golf scores he can then use as political chits underscoring his supposed virility. If Trump were forced to play a round of golf at a new course without a caddy he'd bribed with a monitor watching him closely… he'd shoot between 95 and 105. Any claim he's a good golfer at this age is a farce.”
Many others have suggested that Trump is less than honest about his golf game, and famed sportswriter Rick Reilly even wrote a book on it, entitled “Commander In Cheat.” As Reilly told Deadline in 2024, “I know this because when I play with him, he goes, ‘You know what I do to win these championships, don’t ya?’ and I go, ‘Please tell me. Give it to me.’ And he goes, ‘Anytime I buy a new course, I play the first round all by myself and then I declare myself the club champion. So that’s what kind of guy this is.”
Reilly was accordingly skeptical of Trump’s latest claim to victory, writing, “Among the many hilarious things about club championship #43 is that he lies so much about them he loses his place. We went from 26 to 36 overnight, then skipped 39, 40 and 41. Actual number: 0.”
“Notice how Trump f—— up everything?” he posted later that day, asserting, “Golf was cool. Now there's a greasy orange splotch on it.”
