Golf/Trump detached from reality. Twitter illustration.
With a historic second impeachment underway for a mad king charged with "incitement of insurrection" and "high crimes and misdemeanors," an appalled world continues to turn away from him. Even before idiot hooligans stormed the Capitol, a poll found record negative views of him, with less than a quarter of those in 13 countries - and just 5% in one - declaring him fit to hold his job; two GOP Senators, Toomey and Murkowski, want him to "go away as soon as possible"; George Bush, not exactly a paragon of presidential virtue, has slammed the "banana republic" he's created; and Scotland wants to ban him as "a dangerous person" and "threat to public order," with one lawmaker speaking for us when he proclaimed, "Mr. Trump clearly comes into the category of an undesirable person." Now even the golf world - his most cherished refuge, haven, shameless hideout from a tough job he wasn't doing as America burned - is turning against him. In a first step, the PGA of America will strip him of the 2022 PGA Championship scheduled to be held at his National Bedminster golf club in New Jersey, a key source of both money and prestige. The move comes after much waffling among his elitist peeps over Trump's "manifold indecencies" and what to do about them: The 2017 U.S. women's open at Bedminster was reportedly "a painful spectacle" as attendees "tried to ignore the groping elephant in the room," and many have blasted the likes of Tiger Woods, Nancy Lopez, Jack Nicklaus for consorting with Trump - especially when Gary Player and Annika Sorenstam accepted Medal of Freedom awards from the guy who, the day before, incited the Capitol mob.
The rumblings will likely continue to grow. One unsubstantiated report has PGA canceling all tournaments at Trump courses and instituting a lifetime ban of ever holding any there - a very big deal to a guy who lives to be on the links and soak in the money and sense of detached privilege it bestows. Regardless of whatever formal actions are taken, it's clear the golf world, famed for its professed values of honesty and playing by the rules, is finally taking stock of its involvement with Trump. "Like the nation itself, golf has been measurably diminished by him," writesGolfweek's Eamon Lynch in a blistering appraisal. He urges "no safe harbor for Trump (where) he can safely retreat while fending off indictments," slamming the notion the sport could become "a welcoming sanctuary for a brazen and amoral insurrectionist, a world in which a racist con man was never discomfited even while taking a wrecking ball to the Constitution and the rule of law." Already in the course of his reign, he writes, two of golf's most iconic venues - Miami's Doral Resort and Scotland's Turnberry - "have become untouchable as long as his name remains above the door...Other major venues have felt his caress and withered. Such are the perils of assigning championship venues to a sociopath." As he is ultimately "expelled from civic life," he argues, so should he be from the game that sheltered him from his crimes, what he did "while ignoring a pandemic that has claimed 365,000 lives, refusing to acknowledge a resounding electoral defeat, and inciting feeble-minded fascists to violence that left five people dead at the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue." All those events, he says, "ought to make him a pariah everywhere. Including in golf."
