For years before he won his first presidential election, Donald Trump repeatedly criticised then-president Barack Obama for the amount of time he spent on the course. “Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the US, president Obama spent the day playing golf,” he tweeted in 2014. It was a recurring refrain for him. “I’m going to be working for you. I’m not going to have time to go play golf,” he said during the 2016 campaign.
Obama did, in fact, play a lot. He racked up 333 rounds during his eight years in the Oval Office, more than any president since Dwight D Eisenhower, who was said to have played more than 800 times as president.
Until Trump became president, that is. In his first term alone, Trump clocked up 308 days at the golf club, and now, barely 100 days into his second term, he has beaten Obama’s total eight-year record. Of the first 30 days following Trump’s second inauguration, nine – almost one day in three – featured a golf trip.
What is it with US presidents and golf? There’s George W Bush, who infamously gave a statement about terrorism to journalists from the tee, ending with “I call upon nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers… now watch this drive.” It’s not just the modern era, either: there’s William Howard Taft, who once cancelled a meeting with the president of Chile in order to get to the golf course on time. And then there’s Woodrow Wilson, the undisputed record-holder: he played, incredibly, somewhere between 1,000 and 1,600 times during his two terms, according to the US Golf Heritage Society. That’s roughly every other day.
“There’s actually a golf course at Joint Base Andrews, where Air Force One is housed,” says Jeff James, a retired Secret Service agent whose tenure spanned from the tail end of Bill Clinton’s presidency to Trump’s first term. “That’s a very secure facility and presidents would often golf there. That was nice, because it granted us a lot of security that wouldn’t be there even if it’s a private country club.
“When it’s a public course, it is a little bit of a monster,” James adds, “because it’s just so wide and so open, you know how golf courses are, for hundreds of yards.”
The danger is real. In 2024 during the election campaign, one of the Secret Service agents on Trump’s detail spotted a rifle barrel poking out of the tree-line at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club. The agent opened fire, but the would-be assassin fled the scene, leaving behind an “AK-47-style” rifle with a scope. According to prosecutors the gunman, Ryan Routh, who was quickly tracked down and arrested, had been lying in wait there for 11 hours. This was just 64 days after another attempt on Trump’s life at a rally in Pennsylvania.
For the Secret Service, “the challenges” of protection operations on a golf course “are enormous”, says Bill Gage, another former Secret Service agent. “ It’s an open space, right? Lots of places to hide. Very difficult to secure.”
But Trump doesn’t just play golf. Arguably, the Trump administration is a golf course company with a government attached: once Trump gives up the presidency he will have been enriched to the tune of billions of dollars by golf talks masquerading as political negotiations.
The “flying palace” luxury jet Trump is set to receive as a gift from Qatar, valued at $400m, will easily be the biggest direct gift any president has ever accepted. But when he arrived in the Gulf for his presidential trip in May, the plane may not have been the most valuable thing Trump accepted from the Emirate even that month. On April 30, Trump’s son, Eric, signed a deal to develop a Trump International Golf Club in Simaisima, just north of Doha, for $5.5bn.
That follows a similar 2022 partnership to build a Trump resort in Oman; a Trump golf course in Dubai opened back in 2017. Vietnam’s negotiation with Washington over the administration’s punishing tariffs is intrinsically linked with the Trump Organisation’s construction of a $1.5bn development, including three golf courses, near Hanoi, which broke ground on May 21. The quid pro quo is impossible to miss.
He has also been trying to push through a takeover of the most prestigious golf tournament organisation – the PGA Tour – by the competing Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf League, which bailed Trump out by hosting events at his courses after the PGA cancelled its tournament at his New Jersey course in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riots. Such a takeover would directly benefit him financially of course, but even more than that, it plucks one of his most fundamental strings: getting revenge on an old, prestigious institution that has snubbed him.
Sports writer Rick Reilly – who has played golf with several presidents, including this one – says in his book Commander In Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump: “No president has been as up to his clavicles in golf as Donald Trump. None has been woven so deeply into the world of golf. Trump doesn’t just play courses; he builds them, buys them, owns them, operates them, sues over them, lies about them, bullies with them, and brags about them. From the people he knows, to the businesses he runs, to the favours he hands out, to the access he grants, to the trouble he gets into, to the places he goes, to the money he makes, to the money he loses, to the opinions it informs in his brain, Trump’s soul is practically dimpled.”
Trump isn’t the only president known to have cheated at golf: Clinton was well known as a flagrant and consistent cheater. But the current president, unsurprisingly, takes lying about his game almost to an art form. Trump has claimed to have won 18 club championships, a statement Reilly describes as “a lie that’s so over-the-top Crazytown it loses all credibility among golfers the second it’s out of his mouth.” Suzann Pettersen, a 15-time PGA champion who was a regular golf partner of Trump’s, summed it up in an interview with the Guardian in 2018: “He cheats like hell.”
Which takes us back to a course called Cobbs Creek in Philadelphia, where young Donald learned to play golf when he was a student at Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania. Known as “the Crick”, it was notorious for the bets and grifts its members made with each other. “I had friends that were golfers,” Trump told Golf Digest in 2014. “I’d never played golf – I always played baseball and football and stuff. And so I’d go out to Cobbs Creek… a public course, a rough course, no grass on the tees, no nothing, but it was good, and great people.”
He found a spiritual home there. Of his fellow members in the Crick milieu, Trump says they were “all hustlers… I mean, more hustlers than any place I’ve seen to this day. I played golf with my friends, and then I started to play with the hustlers.”
“I learned a lot,” he adds. “I learned about golf, I learned about gambling. I learned about everything.”
Every presidential golf trip is a colossal operation. “ Let’s say the president says ‘OK, I’m gonna go golfing this day next week.’ Well, you know, now you’re gonna have a chain of events that people are gonna become involved in,” Gage says. “Everybody involved from the Secret Service, you’re probably talking three or four hundred [people], sometimes more, sometimes a little bit less.”
Trump, of course, favours playing at his own clubs, which has huge knock-on effects on the cost. He also, in fact, directly profits from this: in 2020 the Washington Post revealed that when the president visits his own properties he charges the Secret Service – ie the taxpayer – for their use of the rooms. These charges, the Post reported, were often as high as $650 per night for a room or $17,000 a month for a cottage residence, charges that quickly rise into the multimillion-dollar range (the total is still unknown as much of the documentation around these arrangements is heavily redacted).
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, counted 500 separate visits by Trump to properties he owns. This, the group noted, meant he’d spent more than a full year of his presidency visiting or staying at his own real estate at the taxpayer’s expense – and this was back in August 2020. Fully 134 of those visits were to his Mar-a-Lago golf resort, which Trump regularly refers to as “the winter White House”. He also visited his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey more than 100 times in his first term.
A report by the Government Accountability Office released in 2019 that looked into four trips to Mar-a-Lago between February and March 2017 during his first term found those visits alone cost taxpayers $13.6m. That number doesn’t include the salaries of the travelling personnel, only their overtime pay. Simply flying Air Force One costs around $200,000 per hour, according to the Associated Press. In late 2020, the Huffington Post estimated that the cost of Trump’s golfing trips in his first term was skyward of $150m.
Then there’s the cost to local law enforcement. Just one trip to Mar-a-Lago in February 2025 – one of three he had already made in just the six weeks since his second inauguration – cost local police more than $1m in protection. That same week, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office asked county commissioners to request an extra $45m in reimbursement funding for presidential protection – an amount intended to last just until the end of November.
Surprisingly, even after the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump’s course, it still isn’t usual practice for a golf club to be shut down for security when the president plays. Instead, Gage says, “The Service has a protocol where agents go out a couple holes ahead, agents trail, you know, a couple holes behind.”
James says: “We try as much as we could not to interrupt business for anyone, whether it was a restaurant or a golf course, we really wouldn’t shut down the whole thing.
“Every president, Bush, Obama, Clinton, they all enjoy golfing. So, you know, they shouldn’t have to give up that hobby, or give up that ability to get out on a course with somebody, or take someone out in the diplomatic setting,” James continues. “If there’s an actionable threat, we’ll say, ‘Hey, you know, sir, it’s probably not a good idea that you go today’. There’s no guarantee they’d listen to us, but, you know, if it’s just a normal day, we want the people we protect to be able to enjoy what they do, and we’ll make it as safe as it can be.”
That means every president presents a completely different challenge to protect on the links – because each of them brings a different approach to the game. “Bush Senior and Bush Junior had this style, I think they called it speed golf,” Gage, the protection agent, says. “They tried to play around in under two hours, which is wild. Like, no practice shots, no business, no discussing geopolitics. It was just swing and go. It was a unique, kind of comical form of golf that they played really fast.” Obama, on the other hand, “would take his time… and a lot of business was conducted.” He would also, Gage adds, “smoke cigars even though he had told Michelle he had quit.”
Trump’s approach to the game, though, is so typical of his approach to the presidency that it almost serves to sum it up in its totality. For him, like politics, golf is less about competition than about status. On the course, he is as he sees himself in the White House – an absolute monarch, with his taxpayer-funded protection an intrinsic part of his divine right. He plays as he governs: with total corruption, as if victory is predestined, no matter what it costs, because he is not the one picking up the tab. Golf is the Trump administration in synecdoche, and the Secret Service has become corrupted in turn by it, made complicit in his cheating.
And it doesn’t even get him the adulation he pays for. Asked who was the best at the game, Gage barely pauses. “Bush 43,” he says, is “a really good golfer.”
Nicky Woolf is a writer and podcaster who specialises in politics, technology and digital subcultures
