AS I SEE IT COLUMN: Trump’s cheating at golf reveals his true personality

“To find a man’s true character, play golf with him” – P.G. Wodehouse

Donald Trump is many things. He is evil, ignorant, incurious, corrupt, a pathological liar, a convicted felon, a malignant narcissist, he called Jeffrey Epstein a close friend, he’s cruel and a bully.

He also is a cheat in golf.

And with the news that he allegedly won his 40th golf trophy last week, it’s worth a deeper dive into how golf reveals Trump’s true, ugly character.

Here’s another quote from Wodehouse to set the table of our discussion.

“Golf, my dear fellow, is the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is a man who will serve you faithfully and well.”

If you go onto YouTube and search “Trump cheats at golf” you will see with your own eyes that (a) he is not a great golfer and (b) he cheats.

Here is what Trump is quoted by GolfWeek as saying after he won: “I won with a score of 70, and am so honored in that, unlike the rest of the field, I’m given very little time to practice, because I’m focused on many other things. It’s called TALENT, and I have it, and they don’t!”

How needy can he be? Did ever get a hug from mom and dad as a child?

If you read “Commander in Cheat,” the hilarious book about Trump cheating in golf written by former Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly, you will read about all kinds of crazy stories about the myriad ways the president cheats at golf. The craziest has to be the time he hit a ball into the water and when it showed up on land Trump said something like the “tide must have brought it back.”

According to Reilly, Trump gets away with cheating so much is because he has a faster golf cart that everyone else. As Mickey Mantle once said, “He who has the fastest golf cart never has a bad lie,” as a cheater can get to his ball first and nudge it onto a better lie before others see him.

It’s revealing that all of Trump’s alleged 40 club championship titles happen on his own course. It is a fact that sometimes he golfs by himself and then days or weeks later when the tournament is actually taking place, he phones in his score and declares himself the champion.

Perhaps even more laughable than that is the one time he entered a tournament that was not being played on one of his courses. In 2006 near Lake Tahoe, the convicted felon finished 67th out of 73 players.

Golf is the only sport on earth run entirely on the honour system. There are no officials keeping score. It’s up to the integrity of the person to be honest.

Legendary Arnold Palmer said he would never close a business deal until he played a round of golf with someone and witnessed how that person handled adversity.

Researchers have determined that the president has spent a whopping 22% of his second term on a golf course. This when his country is at war, the economy is in trouble, there are elections in November and when he had the audacity to criticize Presidents Obama and Biden for how much they golfed.

How about ending the war in Iran and stop killing innocent people instead of cheating on a golf course?

He can barely stay awake at meetings, and he expects us to believe he really shot a two-under par 70?

People can rightly laugh off golf as nothing more than a country club sport, but golf’s unique capacity to reveal a person’s true character explains why Trump thinks he is all powerful and can do whatever he wants.

That such a deeply flawed, needy and troubled person has the nuclear codes that could end life on this planet, should horrify us all.