Donald Trump, Golfing Fool!

There are many questions to be answered at the start of President Donald J. Trump’s first term (and hopefully last) in office. Did members of his campaign team “co-ordinate” with the Russians to win the election? Will his climate policies make the whole world worse for generations to come? And does Melania really gaze upon him across a dinner table and think, “This man, that hair! So sexy!”

But the subject today is golf.

To be clear, I have nothing against golfers. If a president wants to play golf, he or (theoretically) she has every right. I do, personally, hate golf. I despise plaid pants and once shot a 17 on one hole.

Still, the golfing exploits of Mr. Trump may say something profound about the kind of man we elected and how he plans to rule—and I’m not just bothered because he resembles a tubby penguin waddling across a green.

I simply cannot tolerate hypocrisy.

You may remember, back before Candidate Trump began insulting Mexicans, Muslims and Little Marco—and Hillary, sure—when he aimed his heaviest Twitter guns at President Barack Obama. For five long, discreditable years he insisted the sitting President wasn’t even American. On one occasion, he went for a rare double play, informing right-wing radio banshee Laura Ingraham: 

[Obama] doesn’t have a birth certificate, or if he does, there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him. Now, somebody told me—and I have no idea if this is bad for him or not, but perhaps it would be—that where it says “religion,” it might have “Muslim.” And if you’re a Muslim, you don’t change your religion, by the way.

It was classic Trump. Someone told him. He was only repeating (and you even had an ugly whiff of Muslim-hating). If he was wrong, how could anyone say he was responsible for spreading lies if all he was doing was moving his lips?

Then one day, during the campaign, Trump finally admitted. “The President was born in this country.”

Sadly, Trumpophiles barely noticed. But here’s a fun fact: Nothing in the U.S. Constitution bars a Muslim from holding the highest office. Who says? The Founding Fathers do! And even the most dimwitted right-winger should be able to grasp this fact because Article VI, Section 3, is abundantly clear. If you can give oath or affirmation to uphold the Constitution, you’re in. No “religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

It wasn’t just the “missing” birth certificate that gave Citizen Trump ulcers, however. It really fried his fat buns to see President Obama take to the links. t made Trump so mad he repeatedly had to grab his phone and Tweet.

Was Candidate Trump correct? According to The Golf Channel, which I would never voluntarily watch, unless I was laid up in isolation with Ebola, Mr. Obama did indeed like golf. During two terms he teed it up for 333 rounds, or 41 per year. This was nowhere close to a record. Woodrow Wilson played 1,200 rounds and still had time to win World War I. Dwight D. Eisenhower completed 800 rounds during his two terms in office.

Meanwhile, Trump promised fans he would do better. “I love golf, I think it’s one of the greats, but I don’t have time,” he assured a roaring crowd as recently as December. Obama, he sneered during the campaign, “played more golf last year than Tiger Woods. We don’t have time for this. We don’t have time for this. We have to work.”

He repeatedly assured supporters he’d be too busy working for them, working for the American people, to play golf. If he did play, though (but he wasn’t going to), he would use golf to make connections with lawmakers and cut deals and get legislation passed.

Then came Inauguration Day and he discovered health care was complicated (who knew!) and being President was hard.

Once upon a time, Trump wailed long and loud about all the days Obama had spent on vacation and the high costs of his travel at taxpayer expense. Now, on almost a weekly basis, President Trump packed his golf shoes and clubs and headed for his estate at Mar-a-Lago, Florida. He was there in February three weekends in a row and when he was it seemed he might have played golf.

How much? Neither Trump nor his aides dared say.

On one occasion, a spokeswoman admitted President Trump might have stepped out on his course to hit a few balls. “The next day,” the Denver Post reported, “a photo emerged on social media that showed Trump with professional golfer Rory McIlroy. McIlroy told golf website nolayingup.com that he played 18 holes with Trump.”

Okay, the spokesman soon admitted, there had been a change of plans. The President did play a round.

In weeks to come, the golf-course sightings continued. White House aides lamely insisted, “If the golf glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Trump admitted to a round with Japanese Prime Minister Abe on February 11. No problem there. But the “fake news” kept piling up. Golf.com noted that Trump spent one weekend at Mar-a-Lago and managed to skip “over to nearby Trump International Golf Club for several hours on Saturday and Sunday.” Did he play golf? No one would say. The New York Times noted that the Trump Administration was going to great lengths to keep the President’s golfing activities from view. Doors and windows of the press room where reporters were holed up at Trump National Golf Club were covered in sheets of plastic so no pictures of Trump flailing away could “leak.”

The mystery thickened with each passing week. Was the Tweeter-in-Chief playing golf or was he hard at work for the American people, as promised? The Times reported again on March 19, a Sunday. The President spent seven hours at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach over the weekend. Had he played golf? “Very little,” aides claimed. On Twitter, however, a friend, Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media “shared a photograph of Mr. Trump wearing a golfing glove, white polo shirt and red ‘Make America Great Again’ cap and giving a thumbs-up as he posed with two golfers at Trump International.”

In other words, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and wears golf shoes, it’s President Trump on a golf course.

Reporters, The Times explained, were spending hours in a conference room at a public library “across the road from the ornate gates and view-obstructing hedges of Trump International, harboring suspicions” that the President was out there teeing it up. Once again, a spokeswoman admitted Trump might have stepped out at times to hit a few balls, “but I cannot confirm that at the time.”

There was talk about how the President was holding meetings at these clubs and busting his butt in the interest of the American people. Yet photos and comments from people who had just played with him kept leaking out. On March 20, CNN reported that he had been seen “multiple times” driving “up the 12th hole on his championship course at Trump International.” Five days later, Golf News Net reported that Trump had visited his courses twelve times during his first two months in office.

On March 26, The New York Times weighed in once more. Reporters noted that the President was staying close to home for the weekend. Saturday he headed for Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia. He was back in D. C. in time for dinner at Trump International Hotel that night. Then it was back to the club the next day. This marked the eighth weekend in a  row for the President to visit at least one of the properties he owned.

Was this all good for the American people? It was certainly good for the Trump Family bottom line. No less an authority than Eric Trump told reporters, “The stars have all aligned. I think our brand is the hottest it’s ever been.” In fact, the fee to join the club at Mar-a-Lago was doubled to $200,000.

You could buy a lot of Make America Great caps with that.

Still, the Administration refused to admit Mr. Trump was playing golf or even dreaming about playing golf. Then photos emerged again on social media, appearing to show him in golf shoes and out on the course on Saturday—and couch potatoing  on Sunday, not working hard for the people, but watching golf on TV.

So the questions grew. How many rounds of golf had our President played since taking office? How much did it cost taxpayers to pay for him and his entourage to head south almost every weekend?

Not even loyal lapdog Sean Spicer knew how often President Trump had played. Rather, as one TV reporter noted, citing “the President’s privacy, Trump’s aides are left trying to conceal the President’s frequent golfing.

So that’s where the matter stands. A serial-hypocrite bashes his predecessor for playing golf. Caught putter-handed, the hypocrite denies playing golf. “Mr. Trump, you’re standing on the seventh green, holding a putter. You’re playing golf, sir,” a reporter might theoretically say.

“No I’m not,” you can imagine Trump’s reply.

That’s what most worries me here. If you can’t tell the truth about playing golf, can you be trusted to tell the truth about anything else?

And do Russians play golf?