One veteran sports journalist and author recently expanded on his claims that President Donald Trump is a notorious cheater when it comes to golf, and argued that the president’s alleged habit of rigging golf games in his favor is a key way to truly understand him.
On Monday, writer Rick Reilly joined former CNN host Jim Acosta’s Substack show to talk about his firsthand experience of watching Trump cheat at golf, which is in his 2019 book: “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.” According to the Palm Beach Post, Reilly wrote about one specific event in which Trump cheated against a CEO and his son when they were playing golf with Trump on a course with a large pond that players had to navigate around.
Trump had previously claimed that when MidOcean Partners CEO Ted Virtue won the West Palm Beach club championship, it didn’t count because the president had been out of town and unable to compete. Trump then challenged Virtue and his son to a nine-hole competition. When the three came to the hole with the large pond, Virtue and his son hit their balls onto the green, while Trump’s shot landed in the water. But when they came to the other side of the pond, Trump lined up behind Virtue’s son’s ball, insisting it was his own.
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“The son is like, ‘That’s my ball!’ But Trump’s caddie goes, ‘No, this is the president’s ball; your ball went in the water.’ … Trump makes that putt, and wins 1-up,” Reilly recounted.
During his interview with Acosta, Reilly quipped that when Trump plays golf, he “cheats like a four-year-old cheats at solitaire” and that “he forgets the lies he tells because it’s so many.” He added that Trump claims to play with a handicap of 2.8 strokes (the typical handicap for men is 14.2 strokes), which he argued was particularly incredulous as any handicap below 10 strokes means a player is significantly better than most.
“His handicap is 2.8! If that’s his handicap, Queen Elizabeth is a world champion pole vaulter,” Reilly told Acosta.
The conversation over Trump’s integrity as a golfer has resurfaced following a viral clip from last weekend, in which Trump played a round of golf at his Turnberry course in Scotland. One video appears to show Trump’s golf caddy surreptitiously dropping a ball in a more favorable position on the green after Trump hit his ball into the rough (a patch of much taller grass that makes an accurate swing more difficult).
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