The commander-in-cheat comes to Scotland

Illustration by David Foldvari

The biggest golf cheat of the modern age.

This is already well known in the golfing community and was documented at length by the sports writer Rick Reilly in his book Commander in Cheat. Trump cheats in every way possible: he improves his lie. He has his caddy drop a new ball if the old one is lost. He just doesn’t count shots he doesn’t like. (To be fair, this last offence isn’t unique to Trump. It is endemic with American golfers, many of whom will take a “breakfast ball” off the first tee, which simply means not counting your first shot if you don’t like it. They’ll take “mulligans” all over the course, which again means just not counting a bad shot.) All of this is how Trump manages to maintain a golf handicap of 2.8: even lower than Jack Nicklaus’s. If you believe that, I have some NFTs to sell you.

And this week, Trump’s disgraceful reputation was soiled even further (something I thought impossible, like Spud further soiling those bed sheets in Trainspotting) when he was caught – on camera – cheating at golf in Scotland. That’s right, the Dockers-Clad Sweating Oaf Sex Pest chose to cheat at golf at the home of golf. For a golfer, this is like a Catholic not only committing adultery but choosing to commit it in the Vatican. In the Papal Audience Hall. In front of the Pope. From behind. Using a condom. While singing Orange Lodge songs.

All of this is bad enough, but Trump cheated at Turnberry, just 20 miles or so down the Ayrshire coast from where I am typing this on holiday. For those of you who don’t know your golf, Turnberry is a legendary links course. (A legendary links course I can no longer play on holiday since Trump bought the place in 2014.) You can watch the video of his cheating yourself, but this is what happened: Trump came driving up in a golf cart towards the bunker his ball was surely in. Two forecaddies were walking ahead of him and...

Actually, a few notes before we continue. The fact that Trump is in a golf cart at all is an outrage. Everyone walks at Turnberry. Not only is fatso in a cart, he’s in his own special cart, which is souped up to go much faster than anyone else’s. And no golfer uses “forecaddies” any more. It’s a thing Trump has brought back: like recessions and insurrections. Forecaddies are a holdover from the days when rich men in the American south could afford two caddies per round. (Three if you counted the “jam boys”, poor kids who were coated in jam and whose job it was to attract flies and wasps away from the golfers – another custom Trump would probably gladly see brought back.) The forecaddie’s job was to go ahead and find your ball to save time. Now, Trump would probably argue that forecaddies and souped-up carts are necessary for a busy man like the leader of the free world. However, they serve a more sinister purpose. For here’s how Trump plays golf, as documented by Reilly, who has, so far, yet to be sued.

Trump insists on teeing off first. He smashes his ball then drives off very fast after it. Once he’s way ahead of the group he’s playing with, he can kick his ball out of the rough, improve his lie or simply have one of his caddies drop a new ball if his old one is lost or in a bunker. As happened last week, when one of these caddies was filmed dropping a ball Trump then immediately walked up and hit.

Wait, a known sex offender cheats at golf? Big deal, John. And yes, I get your point. It’s like trying Eichmann for jaywalking. Trump is trash/a moral vacuum/whatever. We get that. The question it really brings up is this: what about the guy who threw the ball down for him?

That caddy/secret service guy. What happened to him? Was he already a terrible cheat and that’s why Trump hired him or was he made into a terrible cheat by being in Trump’s orbit? Corruption tends to corrupt. And once you start bending to Trump’s filthy will, there’s no end to it. Look at Paramount, settling his crazy lawsuit that claimed 60 Minutes edited a Kamala Harris interview to show her in a more favourable light. (Something that happens daily for Trump on Fox News.) Look at every single Republican politician who’s had to debase themselves and deny reality to please the, at the risk of repeating myself, Dockers-Clad Sweating Oaf Sex Pest.

There’s one thing that won’t bend to your will: golf. But there are worrying signs that even golf might be cracking.

Trump bought Turnberry in the belief that it would once again host The Open, as it has three times in the past. But golf’s governing body, the R&A (a bunch so fusty they make the average members of a home counties golf club look like Mötley Crüe) were less than impressed by the vulgarian rebranding Turnberry “Trump Turnberry” and the course remained unchosen as a future Open venue throughout his first presidency. After 6 January 2021, the R&A went further, announcing that the Open would never return to Turnberry if its links to the Trump Organization remained.

However, the R&A’s new chief executive, Mark Darbon, recently indicated things might be changing. “I met a couple of months ago with Eric Trump and some of the leadership from Turnberry.” Darbon said. “We had a really good discussion.”

So the message is clear: the R&A welcomes golf cheats. Golf cheats who are documented cheating on film. And so the Open might yet return to Turnberry. Which, when you think about it, is rather like rewarding a man for robbing a bank.

Or, in this case, rewarding him for launching a violent insurrection against the US government.

Thank God Bobby Jones didn’t live to see it.