What Donald Trump gets totally wrong about Joe Biden's golf game
Biden is sneaky good!
Donald Trump is in Ireland today — and he’s playing golf.
After hitting his first drive at his course in Doonbeg, Trump told reporters this:
“You think Biden can do that? I don't think so. Biden doesn't hit a 280 right down the middle, does he? Biden can't hit an 80 down the middle.”
The implication from Trump is clear: He’s a strong and hearty man who even at age 76 can still hit the ball a long way while Biden, at 80, is feeble and frail — and not a good golfer to boot!
But I don’t think Trump is actually right. In my book “Power Players: Sports, Politics and the American Presidency,” I delved into Biden’s golf game (and Trump’s).
The conclusion? Biden doesn’t play much anymore but when he did, he was quite good.
According to Biden biographer Evan Osnos, Biden didn’t take up the game of golf until the late 1970s — as he was approaching 40. He hadn’t grown up playing golf as a kid, a reflection, Osnos told me, of his humble roots.
“Biden did not grow up with the aristocracy,” said Osnos. “He was always peering in through the window and wanted to figure out what that was like.”
But, once Biden started playing, he showed some real aptitude.
In a 2016 Golf Digest piece ranking the top 150 golfers in the DC area, Biden tied for 68th, with a 10 handicap.1 (Then President Barack Obama came in 113th with a 13 handicap; Trump was ranked 12th with a 2.8 handicap.)
And Biden played in the famous golf summit in 2011 — alongside Obama, then House Speaker John Boehner and then Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
As Politico reported at the time:
The Obama-Boehner team — who are still wrangling over trillions in budget cuts and tax hikes — won $2 off Biden-Kasich in what was arguably the most anticipated golf round in U.S. political history.
By mutual consent, none of those involved released their scores — not that reporters weren’t trying mightily to pry them loose. And the bipartisan twosomes drained the outing of its presumed one-on-one appeal, an Obama-Boehner smackdown on the links.
Worth noting that on the 1st hole — the only one reporters were allowed to observe — Biden made bogey while the other three made pars.
That round of golf became a point of contention during the 2012 campaign — weirdly.
In a speech at the Republican National Convention that year, Kasich took direct aim at the golf game of his erstwhile partner.
Said Kasich:
“Folks, let me you this — Joe Biden disputes a lot of those of facts, but Joe Biden told me that he was a good golfer. And I’ve played golf with Joe Biden, I can tell you that’s not true, as well as all of the other things that he says.”
While Biden’s relative skill may be a point of some dispute, there’s no debate that he does not play nearly as much golf in office as did Trump and Obama.
In fact, after he won the White House in 2020, Biden waited three months before playing his first round.
When he did play it was at his home course — Wilmington Country Club — and with longtime aide Steve Ricchetti and Ron Olivere, the father-in-law to Biden’s late son, Beau.
“The course record is still intact,” Biden joked to reporters after the round. At the time, Biden’s handicap was 6 although, as the Associated Press noted, he hadn’t logged an official round since 2018.
As of July 2022, Biden had played just 15 rounds of golf, according to former CBS reporter and White House numbers guru Mark Knoller. That compared to 91 rounds Trump had played by that point in his presidency and 42 played by Obama.
Biden, to date, has played 20 total rounds of golf, again according to Knoller. The latest came in late December 2022 when Biden was on vacation with his family in the Virgin Islands. Biden played with his 16-year-old grandson.
The New York Post wrote about the outing — primarily, it seems, to note that Biden lost a ball that was later found by an 8-year-old boy.
A quick word on Trump’s approach to golf here. For my book, I talked to Luke Kerr-Dineen, the swing improvement editor at Golf magazine. And here’s what he told me about Trump’s approach to his golf game:
He hits the ball a long way off the tee. And he focuses singularly on hitting the ball off the tee. To him, that’s the sign of a good golfer. Putting and all these other details are not as telling as your ability to hit the ball.
Which feels almost too spot-on when trying to see how Trump’s view of golf informs his view of life. There’s, of course, much more on all of that in my book!
So. Trump is the better golfer and likely does hit the ball farther off the tee than Biden. But Trump also plays more than Biden. Like, A LOT more.
Plus, there’s this: How long you hit it off the tee is not correlated to how good a president you are.
A 10 handicap means that if par for the course is 72, you usually shoot around 82 or 10 over par. A 2 handicapper would, typically, shoot 74 on that same course.
According to another golf writer, Trump cheats on every game he plays.
Many of the people Trump has played with over the years have said, both off the record and sometimes for attribution, that Trump doesn’t even pretend to keep an accurate score of his game.
He routinely gives himself Mulligans (a second ball) when his first shot is not well struck. He “finds” his ball in the rough when it’s lost while not even disguising dropping another ball, he gives himself putts that are often three to five feet long.
In short, his handicap is a joke.
No one wants to bet serious money with him on a golf game (though he is known to be favorable towards golfing opponents who need something from him and agree to a large bet at the outset of a round of golf-- of course with no hint of bribery).
Net, net, any discussion of Trump’s golf skills compared to others is wasted effort since he cheats routinely, which should be no surprise to any sentient adult, and pouts if his opponents call him on it.
Just another unsurprising facet of the man’s twisted personality.