In his book, Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, Rick Reilly alleged the American president’s conduct on the course was far from exemplary.
“Trump doesn’t just cheat at golf,” the author wrote. “He cheats like a three-card monte dealer. He throws it, boots it and moves it. He lies about his lies. He fudges and foozles and fluffs.”
Now a video has emerged from the president’s trip to Scotland that may support his thesis.
Taken during a weekend round at his Turnberry course, the video shows Trump parking a golf buggy near a bunker and a large portion of rough.
Walking ahead of the buggy are two caddies. As the US president prepares to get out of the buggy, one of them can be seen stooping down and dropping a ball onto a patch of short grass just before the start of the rough. The president then uses that ball to take his next shot.
Claiming to have found a lost ball in a favourable position and surreptitiously dropping a replacement there — sometimes known as “the trouser leg” — is a well-known golf cheating technique.
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Two weeks ago John Nieporte, head professional at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, and a caddie, denied to The Times that the president was a cheat. (Read his interview in full).
“The proof’s in the pudding,” Nieporte said, pointing to the US president’s competition record. “I’ve seen him win club championships sinking 60ft putts. I’ve seen him shoot 66 out here on this golf course.”
Reilly’s book accused Trump of kicking balls from the rough into the fairway, instructing his caddies to throw opponents’ balls into bunkers and awarding himself a large number of “gimme putts”, where a player picks up their ball, rather than putting it, because the distance is so short.
Trump teeing off and, below, making his way around the course
CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES
CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES
Although Nieporte admitted the president would sometimes move onto the next hole without sinking his gimme putts, this was because the president had a “tight schedule” and could not be on the course for “hours and hours”, he said. Instead he would “give a putt here and there”.
Neither Trump nor the White House have commented on the video.