Golf has a long history in the White House — but for Trump, it’s more than a pastime
For much of the last century, golf has never been that far from the White House. That certainly remains true these days, as Donald Trump is an active golfer, playing regularly on weekends at Mar-a-Lago. People are noticing. As Seth Meyers joked recently, “According to new analysis by the Washington Post, President Trump has spent one-third of his days in office at his golf courses. And I think we might be better off if we could somehow get that up to three-thirds.”
For Trump, golf is not just about relaxation, it’s part of his mindset. When questioned about the appearance of accepting a $400 million Qatari plane as a gift, Trump cited the golfer Sam Snead in response. According to Trump, Snead’s motto was, “When they give you a putt, you say, ‘Thank you very much.’ You pick up your ball, and you walk to the next hole.” Trump also likes to get business done on the golf course. In a recent interview with the Atlantic, Witkoff described how he learned from Senator Lindsey Graham how Trump uses his golf days. According to Graham, “You have breakfast, and it goes as long as Trump wants it to go. Then you play golf, and then you have lunch.” During these sessions, “you talk about all these things.” Witkoff absorbed Graham’s teachings and used his golf and meals time with Trump and Graham to explore possible administration roles, with Witkoff concluding, “I think I’m the guy, maybe Mideast envoy.”
Trump’s mixing golf and work differs from some of his predecessors, who thought it was important to have separation between their official duties and their time on the links. William Howard Taft loved the game, but his predecessor Teddy Roosevelt warned Taft against being photographed in his golf duds, as it might cause Americans to think he was not taking his work seriously. As Roosevelt, who was himself partial to tennis, warned, “I never let friends advertise my tennis, and never let a photograph of me in tennis costume appear.”
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Taft’s successor Woodrow Wilson played golf 1,200 times as president. He even played in the snow, using red-painted balls for easy ball spotting. Unlike Trump, though, Wilson did not like talking business while golfing, so he usually played with his personal physician, Cary Grayson, who had recommended that Wilson take up the game. Although Wilson tried to avoid work on the links, sometimes pressing matters interceded. After the 1916 election, Wilson learned on the golf course that he had won California and would secure a second term as president.
In contrast to Roosevelt’s concerns, Wilson received praise for his regular playing. In July of 1917, Cleveland Moffett wrote in McClure’s, “And how inspiring today is the example of Woodrow Wilson, who regards regular physical exercise as a sacred duty, not to be interfered with nor neglected. Rain or shine, whatever the pressure of events, the President of the United States takes his exercise.”
The thin-skinned Warren Harding was less fortunate. He did not like that comedian Will Rogers used to make fun of Harding for a host of things, including golf. Once, when Harding learned that Rogers planned to mock Harding’s golf game at a show Harding planned to attend, Harding refused to go.
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Dwight Eisenhower was also subjected to many jokes about his golfing. One of the best ones was the bumper sticker that read, “BEN HOGAN FOR PRESIDENT. IF WE’RE GOING TO HAVE A GOLFER, LET’S HAVE A GOOD ONE.” Another joke that made the rounds was that Eisenhower “invented the 36-hole work week.” It was not far off: Ike played about 800 rounds as president, which averaged out to about two 18-hole rounds a week.
Ike was unperturbed by the criticism. He had putting greens installed at both the White House and at Camp David. He also had a regular foursome known as “The Gang,” or “The Augusta Gang,” including Coca-Cola Chairman Robert Woodruff, Frankfort Distilleries President Elles Slater, and W. Alton (Pete) Jones, president of Cities Service Company, now known as CITGO. But Ike didn’t want to do business when he was golfing. In fact, he praised The Gang in his memoir as “men, who, already successful, made no attempt to profit by our association.”
When Eisenhower’s Vice President Richard Nixon became president, he occasionally played with celebrities, including Jackie Gleason, Jimmy Stewart, Bob Hope, and Fred MacMurray. He even played with Snead, who accused Nixon of throwing a ball out of the rough and onto the fairway. Still, Nixon’s general awkwardness inspired this joke about National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger seeing the president in athletic clothes and asking how it went: “I shot a 128 today,” Nixon said. “Your golf game is getting better,” Kissinger replied, only to hear back, “I was bowling, Henry.”
While funny, the joke was unfair. Nixon was a solid golfer who once broke 80 while in retirement. Still, Nixon looked down on those who played too much. Once, when asked about Vice President Spiro Agnew, Nixon was dismissive, saying, “By any criteria he falls short. Energy? He doesn’t work hard; he likes to play golf.”
Like Nixon, Ronald Reagan enjoyed the game and often played with celebrities, including Walter Annenberg and Warren Buffett. But Reagan largely stopped playing golf after an October 1983 weekend that showed the difficulties of playing golf and being president. Reagan was on a golf visit to Augusta with Secretary of State George Shultz, New Jersey Senator Nicholas Brady, and Treasury Secretary Donald Regan. On Saturday morning, he had been awakened to hear developments regarding the recent communist coup in Grenada. Reagan and his team planned an invasion to liberate Grenada, but went ahead with their game so as not to signal that anything was afoot. At that game, National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane kept interrupting to give updates on the unfolding situation. To make matters worse, the game was also interrupted by an armed man who crashed through the gates and took hostages at the clubhouse, demanding to speak to the president. Reagan called the clubhouse via radio phone but ultimately did not speak to the man, who was eventually arrested.
That night, Reagan was awakened again, with worse news. Hezbollah terrorists bombed the Marine headquarters in Beirut, killing 241 U.S. personnel. Reagan returned to Washington without playing his scheduled Sunday game. As a result of the disastrous weekend, he decided to curtail his golf, saying, “Playing golf is not worth the chance that someone could get killed.”
George H.W. Bush also had to navigate the question of how to manage golf and presidential business. Bush had high standards for golf and wanted to play with people who could keep up both in skill and with what he called “speed golf,” completing entire rounds in two hours. Bush’s biggest golfing challenge as president came after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990. He quickly tired of the media shouting Iraq-related questions at him while he played. When reporters peppered him with questions on the first tee at a game that August, he uncharacteristically snapped, saying, “I talk to them every morning at 5:30 and I’m not going to take any more comments up here, though.” He later denied getting testy, saying, “I’ve never been mad at you. I just don’t like taking questions on serious matters on my vacation.”
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Unlike Bush, Bill Clinton saw the golf course as a good place to conduct business. While still in Arkansas, he would try to raise campaign funds from golfing companions. As president, he played regularly with Democratic fixer and corporate board staple Vernon Jordan. Jordan would invite prominent business executives like GE’s Jack Welch, Warren Buffett, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates – despite the fact that Clinton’s Justice Department was investigating Gates’ company. In the game with Gates, Clinton took a mulligan at the outset, something for which he became well known.
Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, had seen the challenge of managing golf and the presidency firsthand. He was playing with his father on the day that the elder Bush said he would no longer take serious questions on the golf course. Bush supported his dad in his typically humorous way, telling one chatty reporter, “Could you wait until we finish hitting at least? My game is really bad. But when you’re talking in the back swing, it gets even worse.”
After W. became president, he got some pushback from the press for his golf habit. In August of 2002, Bush was about to tee off in an early morning game when he was asked by a reporter about a horrific terrorist bus bombing in Israel. Bush responded, “We must stop the terror. I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now, watch this drive.” The video of this unfortunate clip was shown many times on television and was featured in Michael Moore’s anti-Bush documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11. According to presidential golf expert Don Van Natta, “that will go down in presidential golf histories, maybe one of the worst moments of all time.”
Bush stopped playing golf in 2003, during the second Iraq war. In 2008, he revealed his reasons for doing so in an interview with Mike Allen, then of POLITICO: “I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as, you know, to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think, you know, playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
Barack Obama played golf more than 300 times as president, and he, like Trump, liked to do business on the course. Like Clinton, he played with Vernon Jordan in high-profile foursomes, which included Clinton, Tiger Woods, basketball star Ray Allen, former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He also played with some top CEOs, including former UBS CEO and Obama fundraiser Robert Wolf, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, and Obama donor and Silver Lake Co-CEO Glen Hutchins. He also tried to bond with Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner on the links. According to Boehner’s memoir, they kept their conversations to golf while on the course, but engaged in debt ceiling discussions in the clubhouse, agreeing to proceed with behind-the-scenes negotiations.
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Playing with Boehner helped push forward budget talks, but it also raised some hackles on Obama’s side of the aisle. Cultural critic Elayne Rapping said of the once “cool” Obama, “Now he’s playing golf with John Boehner, which is about the most uncool thing there is.” Senate Democrats seemed annoyed as well. When one of them asked his Democratic colleagues if any of them had ever played golf with the president, not one raised his hand. In another Obama game with a Republican lawmaker, Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss scored a hole-in-one, prompting him to quip, “I told him since I made the hole-in-one, he ought to give us everything we want on entitlement reform.”
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Obama and Trump both played a lot of golf, but Trump likes to talk about the game more than any of his predecessors. In one meeting with CEOs, Trump goaded GE’s Jeffrey Immelt into telling the story of a game in which the president hit a hole in one. According to Immelt, Trump had said, “You realize, of course that I’m the richest golfer in the world.” Trump then corrected Immelt – slightly: “I actually said I was the best golfer of all the rich people, to be exact, and then I got a hole in one.”
In his first term, Trump had a golf simulator installed in the White House that would allow him to play the world’s most famous golf courses virtually. When Joe Biden, a solid golfer in his younger years, moved into the White House in 2021, he did not think much of Trump’s golf set up, saying, “What a f***ing a**hole.” Even though Biden did not play that much while in the White House, he maintained that he could have beaten Trump on the links, and needled his rival for being less than honest about his golf score, saying in 2024, “And where’s Trump been? Riding around in his golf cart, filling out his scorecard before he hits the ball?” The rivalry was so heated that claims of who had the superior game actually came up in their one and only debate in June of 2024. Biden claimed that “I got my handicap, when I was vice president, down to six,” but Trump was dubious, saying, “I’ve seen your swing. I know your swing.”
Golf even played a role in the tight election of 2020. Multiple reports suggested that Trump neglected his debate prep in favor of more playing time. Trump was also told by his son-in-law Jared Kushner that he had lost Pennsylvania while gearing up to tee off at the seventh hole in a November, 2020 game. Even though this news doomed his reelection prospects, Trump chose to enjoy the rest of his game, finishing the last 12 holes before heading home.
It’s a safe bet to expect that Trump will keep doing business on the links throughout the rest of his term. Yet while the frequency of his playing is in line with a number of his predecessors, his obsession with golf – and his bringing of the game into the way he approaches his presidency – surpasses them all.
