President Donald Trump is said to be a gracious host at his golf courses. He high-fives his playing partners after a good shot and keeps his cool when his own game goes awry, according to friends, never cursing or throwing his clubs.

But he is also known to run afoul of the game’s play-it-as-it-lies rules. And his trash-talking habit is well-documented by his longtime golfing partners, sportswriters and even links legends like Tiger Woods.


It’s not clear which Trump will show up on the golf course this weekend, when the president hosts Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida.

“He’s absolutely unscrupulous, absolutely completely bankrupt of any morality when it comes to golf,” said Rick Reilly, a longtime sportswriter who joined Trump on the course for a 2004 book about caddying for celebrities. “I don’t know how the Japanese are going to like that.”

Abe first floated the idea of hitting the links with the new Republican president during a post-election meeting at Trump Tower, praising Trump’s golfing empire and noting the symbolism that the last time the two country’s leaders played golf together was 60 years ago, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower hosted Abe’s grandfather, then-Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, at a course in Maryland.

That conversation, according to a White House aide, led to the invitation for Abe and his wife to fly on Air Force One down to South Florida for an R&R weekend outing that includes a stop at one of Trump’s signature courses.

“I guarantee it’ll be one of the most memorable rounds of golf the prime minister has ever played, if not the most memorable, because Donald will see to it,” said Tom Bennison, a Dallas-based executive who’s played more than 100 rounds of golf with Trump over the past 20 years.

Many details on the Trump-Abe golf outing are still under wraps, such as who will join their entourage. But the simple fact Trump is golfing with a foreign dignitary so soon into his presidency offers some early evidence for how he intends to conduct soft diplomacy.

A White House aide said Trump plans to use the golf course while in office to forge more personal connections with other foreign dignitaries, as well as industry officials and members of Congress. The president hinted as much last Sunday when he detailed his planned golfing round with the Japanese leader, who he’ll partner with rather than competing against.



“That’s the one thing about golf—you get to know somebody better on a golf course than you will over lunch,” Trump told Westwood One Sports Radio.

Trump repeatedly criticized President Barack Obama for playing so many rounds of golf during his two terms. But it’s the new president who is on track to spend two of the first four weekends since his inauguration on the links—a much faster pace than either Obama or President George W. Bush. Of Obama’s 333 golfing rounds while president, just three outings were with world leaders, according to a tally kept by CBS News reporter Mark Knoller.

Golf is a mainstay of who Trump the businessman is. His name is attached to 12 U.S. courses, including the iconic “Blue Monster” Doral course in Miami, as well as five more overseas. Two of his courses will host major professional golf tournaments later this year — the Senior PGA Championship in late May at his course just outside Washington and the U.S. Women’s Open will take place in mid-July at Trump National in Bedminster, New Jersey.

The game itself has also been Trump’s primary athletic endeavor throughout his adult life. He boasted on Twitter in 2013 of winning 18 club championships (White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks confirmed Wednesday that’s still the number) and the president lists as his official U.S. Golf Association handicap a 2.8 (his lowest registered round from August 2013 is a 70, and his most recent, a 77, came last June as he was preparing to accept the Republican presidential nomination).

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe watches his drive as he plays a round of golf at a course in Narusawa, Yamanashi prefecture in Japan on Aug. 10, 2013. | Getty

“When he has a chance to practice he shoots pretty close to scratch,” said Mike Adams, a New Jersey-based golf pro who taught Trump in 2002 during a brief stint working at his West Palm Beach country club.

People who have been on the golf course with Trump say he’s not the most technically sound player. “He didn’t have a swing that was pristine by any means or very fundamentally sound,” said Jonathan Carr, a former caddy at Trump’s Bedminster golf course.

“It’s like he bullies the ball,” added John Paul Newport, a former Wall Street Journal golf reporter who wrote a column about losing a one-on-one match to Trump in 2010.

Still, Trump’s playing partners and people who have watched him on the course say he’s a solid all-around golfer, a consistent putter who is accurate and drives for considerable distance off the tee.

“What most impressed me was how far he hits the ball at 70 years old. He takes a pretty good lash,” Tiger Woods wrote on his blog last month, recounting his December outing with the then-president elect where the two men “both enjoyed the bantering, bickering and needling.”

For all his golfing skills, an outing with Trump also comes with his trademark personality.

Newport said Trump tried to mess with him mentally during their round by dissecting his putting stroke. “He was pretty charming,” he said. “He’s a salesman more than anything. He uses your name every third sentence. Everyone likes to hear their name being used.”

In his round with Trump, sportswriter Reilly recalled his host chatting up the course’s maintenance staff, handing out cash to employees who he thought were doing a good job and then quipping right afterward: “Now, they’re the Donald Trumps of Chile.”

“It’s like being at the center of hurricane,” Reilly said. “No subject gets more than 10 seconds.”

But Trump in that round also showed little regard for some of golf’s rules, Reilly said, including keeping accurate scores and requesting “gimmies” on short putts and even once when his ball wasn’t even on the green.

“You never saw him putt a short one. Everything was ‘good,’ ‘good’, good,’” Reilly said.

That presidents may take certain liberties on the golf course isn’t out of the norm. Bill Clinton was known to frequently tee up mulligans. During a 2016 round on the outskirts of London with British Prime Minister David Cameron, with the press within earshot, Obama announced he was taking a “gimmie” after missing a putt on the 18th hole.

Accusations Trump doesn’t always play golf by the rules have long followed him around, too. In 2012, rock star Alice Cooper told Q Magazine: “The worst celebrity golf cheat? I wish I could tell you that. It would be a shocker. I played with Donald Trump once. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Several of Trump’s friends interviewed by POLITICO defended the president’s golfing integrity, saying they’ve never witnessed him cheat. And Trump himself has pushed back before when pressed on the subject. “I don’t drop balls, I don’t move balls. I don’t need to,” he told The Washington Post last summer.

One thing Trump doesn’t dispute is his penchant for trash-talking on the golf course.

“I like to play with someone who can take some ribbing,” he told Golf Magazine in a 2008 interview. “If someone’s ball is hanging above a bunker and about to go in, I may shout out, ‘Bury!’ But you have to know who you can do that with. I don’t like playing with guys who are overly serious. You can’t forget that playing golf is not what we do for a living.”

But when he tees it up with Abe, he may want to be careful he doesn’t create a diplomatic crisis, said Sheila Smith, a senior fellow on Japan at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“It depends on how trashy,” she said. Abe, she said, is “a fairly respectful classy kind of guy. I don’t think he’s going to really get into stuff in the way we’ve heard some of the conversations at rallies with Mr. Trump.”