Sunday, March 31, 2019

What did Donald Trump do today?

He played golf, as only he can.

Trump played somewhere between his 165th and 179th round of golf today. (The uncertainty is because of the heroic measures that his staff sometimes undertake to conceal whether Trump is golfing, or merely visiting a golf course he owns.) 

At this point, even Trump's fiercest critics have mostly given up on pointing out the hypocrisy of these trips, given that he complained bitterly about President Obama's (comparatively mild) golf habit, and promised as a candidate that he'd be "too busy" to waste time on the links if elected. Likewise, the mounting expense of flying Trump to and from Washington, D.C. to Florida or New Jersey every week seems to have taken a backseat to other ethical considerations in the Trump presidency.

But a recent book sheds new light on Trump as a golfer.  Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump is full of anecdotes about how Trump's loose relationship with the truth extends to his love of golf. The most direct example of this is Trump's supposed handicap of 2.8. The lower the handicap, the better the golfer. Trump is, in effect, claiming that he is a better golfer than Jack Nicklaus, whose handicap has never been lower than 3.4 in the past year.


Nicklaus is healthy, of a similar age to Trump, plays regularly, and is generally regarded as one of the best golfers of all time. Trump, however, is not without his own accomplishments: he recently declared himself the winner of a tournament he didn't even play in.

That would make golf one of many things that Trump (who claims he was scouted by major league baseball teams as a high schooler, before bone spurs supposedly cut short his athletic career), believes he is better than the best at. 

So what?

  • It's wrong to accuse people of bad things you do yourself.
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