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Former President Donald Trump joins the biggest controversy in sports this week as his New Jersey golf club hosts the latest event in the Saudi-funded LIV Golf Series, further cementing his relationship with Saudi Arabia and angering the families of the 9/11 victims who have called the initial venture “sports laundering”.
While the renegade golf circuit has hosted two other events, including one in the United States, this week’s event at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, NJ, promises to be an even more eye-catching turning point, given the its proximity to Manhattan and the involvement of the former president.
In recent days, Trump has publicly and privately dismissed human rights concerns about the Saudi kingdom and criticized the professional golf establishment. He is expected to attend every day of this weekend’s event and has been in contact with organizers for months about the details of the event, according to an aide, who said Trump remains livid with the PGA of America officials who moved the 2022 PGA Championship from their Bedminster club after the Jan. 6 uprising. Doral, his club outside of Miami, will host another LIV Golf event in October.
Trump and his spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
Funded by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, the LIV Golf company has landed high-profile players with exorbitant guaranteed paychecks and lavish perks. But while the players have pocketed a lot of money (some signing bonuses have reportedly run into eight- and nine-figure paydays), they’ve also faced tough questions about the allegations against their benefactors, including the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist. .
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Some 9/11 families protested at this month’s LIV event at Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club outside Portland, Ore., and last week members of the 9/11 Justice group sending a letter to Trump urging him to cancel this week’s event and requesting a meeting with the former president. Brett Eagleson, whose father was killed in the 9/11 attacks, said a Trump aide contacted him Saturday to discuss the letter.
“It was a frustrating, frivolous call and it made me angrier,” Eagleson said. “I wish they hadn’t even called.”
According to Eagleson, the aide said the LIV contract was binding “and there is no way out” and that Trump was “grateful and grateful for the letter” from the 9/11 families.
“My response was, you have to appreciate that what you’re saying, the words ring hollow,” Eagleson said. “If it’s so important, why is he calling me? Why doesn’t he tell me himself?”
Trump repeatedly defended Saudi Arabia while he was president. He made his first trip abroad to the country, to the concerns of some councillors. Since leaving office, son-in-law Jared Kushner has attracted major investments from the country’s sovereign wealth fund, according to multiple reports.
In an interview this week with the Wall Street Journal, Trump said: “I don’t know a lot about the families of 9/11. I don’t know what that has to do with it, and their very strong feelings, and I can understand their feelings . I can’t really comment on that because I don’t know exactly what they’re saying and what they’re saying who did what.”
Trump met with a group of 9/11 family members in the Oval Office in 2019, according to two people in attendance, and pledged to declassify and release records related to the attack. More than a dozen family members were at the meeting, and some left in tears after years of trying to access records about the Saudi Arabian government, they said.
“We all left happy. We were crying; families were hugging,” Eagleson said. “He told all of us, ‘We’re going to help you. Don’t worry about it. It’s done.'”
But soon, William P. Barr, Trump’s attorney general, classified the documents as top secret, and the White House made no effort to track down the families, according to two people present at the meeting.
“Trump was a disappointment as a sitting president, and now he’s an even bigger disappointment as a former president,” said Terry Strada, national president of 9/11 Families United, whose husband, Tom, worked at the North Tower during the attacks. “He knows more than anyone the level of depravity in the kingdom, and he knows—he’s a New Yorker—he knows how families were affected by the attacks. Seven hundred and fifty people were lost in New Jersey. It’s right in his back yard and just, what, six weeks before the birthday? It’s beyond insulting.”
Since June: Golf legend Greg Norman is throwing his sport into chaos. This time, he’s doing it with Saudi money.
LIV Golf has been throwing unheard of amounts of money at golfers, course operators and even broadcasters. It has created a strong division in sport; defectors have been suspended by the PGA Tour, and others chose to renounce their membership on golf’s top tour.
Trump has long been passionate about the sport and has counted many of the world’s top golfers as friends. But in recent years he has struggled to gain formal entry into the world of professional golf; many stakeholders, especially in recent years, have shied away from his properties and at times clashed with Trump himself.
The PGA Tour hasn’t held a tournament at a Trump course since 2016. Doral hosted a PGA event for more than half a century in South Florida. After purchasing the resort from bankruptcy in 2012, Trump renamed it Trump National Doral. But after losing Cadillac as a title sponsor, the PGA moved the event to Mexico City in 2016. In response, Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee at the time, told Fox News host Sean Hannity, “I hope that they have kidnapping insurance.”
Following the January 6 uprising, the PGA of America rescinded its agreement to host its 2022 PGA Championship at the Bedminster course. The R&A said Trump’s Turnberry Club in Scotland would not be considered as a British Open venue for the “foreseeable future”.
That left Trump with few options for hosting a tournament with any level of prestige. Trump Golf’s portfolio includes 19 properties worldwide, but there are no major tournaments in sight. LIV was the only imminent option, creating a marriage of two controversial entities that have tried to make their way to mainstream acceptance.
Because LIV’s finances aren’t public, it’s not known how much Trump has to host LIV events, but several industry insiders estimated in the millions.
The Bedminster event is likely to see protesters this week — relatives of 9/11 victims held a news conference Tuesday and have another scheduled for Friday — and has been shrouded in controversy since of day 1. The sport has been thrown into a state of chaos. , if not a full-blown crisis. The tour has lost several stars, including Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau, and cannot match the deep pockets of the Saudi-backed group.
The winner this weekend in Bedminster will take home $4 million, the last-place golfer will take home $120,000, and no golfer will make the cut for high scores. By comparison, the winner of last weekend’s PGA Tour event, the 3M Open, took home $1.35 million, and only 11 golfers in the 153-man field earned more than $105,000.
In a statement about LIV last week, Trump made no mention of Saudi support or the controversy surrounding the event. For him, it’s about money.
“All those golfers who remain ‘loyal’ to the very disloyal PGA, in all its various guises, will pay a heavy price when the inevitable MERGER with LIV arrives, and you get nothing but a big ‘thank you’ from the officials of the PGA. who are making millions of dollars a year,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Multiple senior golf executives said that while Trump will make a lot of money from the event and his course will receive international exposure, the former president likely also relishes the opportunity to tweak the PGA Tour, which will host its own event. this week. in Detroit, the classic Rocket Mortgage.
Greg Norman, the LIV commissioner and Hall of Fame golfer, has been friends with Trump for years, and the two spoke several times on the home circuit. “He loves it,” Norman said in a recent interview.
“He loves the concept, he loves the set, and he thinks I’m the perfect guy for it,” Norman said. “We’ve had a lot of conversations.”
Bedminster has long served as a key hub in Trump’s world; the former president spends much of the summer months away from the New Jersey club. A Washington Post report estimated that Trump spent 106 days at the club while president, playing nearly three dozen rounds of golf there.
Trump has played 18 to 36 holes of golf four to five days a week since leaving office, an aide said. In recent months, he has spoken to or played with several professional golfers, including Johnson, Norman, Jack Nicklaus and Ernie Els, the aide said.
Hosting a premier golf event in Bedminster has always been a dream of Trump’s. He bought the property, more than 500 acres of farmland that once served as the estate of automaker John DeLorean, in 2002. At the inauguration, Trump brandished a shovel and boasted to reporters, “This it’s a special place. We have a lot of work to do, we’re going to do it beyond anyone’s wildest dreams and expectations.”
Ashley Cooper, who managed the property in the early days and was later promoted to managing partner of Trump Golf, said in an email, “We knew from day one that it was intended to accommodate seniors.”
Kent Babb contributed to this report.