THE TRUMP NATIONAL DORAL GOLF CLUB, Florida — President Donald Trump is here today, with fans hoping he’ll award the trophy at the PGA Tour’s Cadillac Championship. But the president has already won.
For a decade, the PGA Tour shunned Trump’s courses, pulling a long-running event from Doral as his first presidential run unnerved sponsors — notably moving one event to Mexico City, after the PGA Tour and other corporations had publicly chastised Trump for his tirades about Mexicans. The moves bruised the president, who forged an alliance with the PGA Tour’s upstart rival, the Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf, and urged top players to defect, too.
But in Trump’s second term, some institutions that once publicly opposed him have backed down. Even those that engaged in quieter resistance, such as the PGA Tour, have come to accommodate him. And now golf’s flagship tour, with the accompanying glitz and glamour, is back at his resort.
So while his popularity lags — recent polls have put Trump’s approval ratings in the mid-30s — this weekend offers the kind of validation that Trump craves: watching the world’s greatest golfers navigate a course he commissioned, as fans consume Trump-branded drinks at the Trump Vodka Bar and marvel at a new golden statue memorializing Trump’s defiant salute after his 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Throngs of cheering people greeted Trump as he arrived Saturday night, ahead of today’s final round.
“They’re at my tournament right now, the PGA,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, offering assessments of several players and noting that he had personally golfed with them. He also teased another event with the other tour: “In two weeks, LIV is going to be at my course right here on the Potomac.”
The White House declined to comment on Trump’s personal involvement in brokering the PGA Tour’s return to Doral and other matters related to the weekend. The White House also referred questions on Friday to the Trump Organization, the president’s family business that is coordinating the weekend’s golf activities.
“We are incredibly proud to welcome the PGA Cadillac Championship back to Trump National Doral,” Eric Trump, the president’s son and executive vice president of the Trump Organization, said in a statement. “This tournament has long stood among the very best in the world of golf … and there is no doubt this will be an unforgettable weekend.”
The PGA Tour announced last August that it would be returning to Doral, long a fixture on the PGA Tour schedule for more than 50 years and originally called the Doral Open. Its list of past champions includes some of the game’s all-time greats, including Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus and Nick Faldo, who have battled their way through the resort’s “Blue Monster” course in the Miami suburbs.
Trump purchased the resort out of bankruptcy in 2012 for a reported $150 million and then poured roughly $250 million into remaking the property. He quickly made himself a visible host, too, greeting players and participating in pro-am tournaments.
“Doral is another fabulous, iconic thing. I like iconic things,” Trump said at a Washington Post live event in April 2013.
Two years later, Trump announced his bid for the presidency — and immediately denigrated many Mexicans as drug dealers and rapists, drawing backlash from businesses that swiftly distanced themselves.
“In response to Mr. Trump’s comments about the golf industry ‘knowing he is right’ in regards to his recent statements about Mexican immigrants, we feel compelled to clarify that those remarks do not reflect the views of our organizations,” the PGA Tour, PGA of America, U.S. Golf Association and LPGA said in a joint statement in July 2015. The groups added they “do not usually comment on presidential politics” but felt compelled because Trump’s rhetoric was inconsistent with their values.
Within a week, PGA of America — a separate organization from the PGA Tour — had yanked an event from Trump’s Los Angeles golf course, with Trump saying he acceded to the decision because he didn’t “want his friends at the PGA of America to suffer any consequences or backlash” from his remarks.
Nearly a year later, and a few days after Trump clinched the GOP nomination for president, the PGA Tour announced it would pull out from Doral, too, relocating the event to Mexico City. Leaders publicly framed their departure as a function of sponsorship changes and a broader push to globalize its schedule. But the timing was hard to ignore, and the tour’s commissioner acknowledged that Trump’s political ambitions were affecting sponsor interest.
The move felt personal to Trump, just as Doral had always felt personal. He had spoken about vacationing in Miami when he was younger, and taking walks at the property with his father, Fred Trump. He bristled publicly, calling the news “a sad day for Miami, the United States and the game of golf,” while also taking aim at the replacement event in Mexico City.
“I hope they have kidnapping insurance,” he said at the time.
Trump also framed the move to his supporters as part of a bigger policy fight around jobs and companies being exported abroad. “If I become your president, this stuff is all going to stop,” Trump said at a June 2016 rally.
But golf leagues’ shunning of Trump didn’t stop. In the waning days of his first term — as part of broad backlash to Trump following the U.S. Capitol riot — the PGA of America stripped Trump of what was set to be the most prestigious golf event ever held at one of his properties, the 2022 PGA Championship.
The frustrated, now-former president cultivated ties with LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed rival league that spent the past several years siphoning talent and attention from the PGA Tour. Beginning in 2022, Doral hosted multiple LIV events, turning a former Tour stronghold into one of the upstart circuit’s most visible American venues. Trump also became a key cheerleader for the new tour, replete with players who became PGA Tour outcasts for taking the Saudis’ money.
“I wonder if the PGA players who didn’t heed my advice and take the massive amounts of money that was offered to them by LIV Golf, feel somewhat ‘stupid’ right now,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform in June 2023.
Still, Trump publicly positioned himself near the center of the sport’s divide, especially after regaining the presidency. He attempted to broker peace between the two tours last year, hosting representatives from both sides at the White House for discussions that ultimately failed to produce a deal.
Now LIV is facing an uncertain future — as its Saudi investors plan to pull funding — and Trump on Thursday predicted that players once shunned by the PGA Tour would find their way back to the tour, too.
“They’ll all be accepted by the tour, there’s no question, because they’re great,” the president said in the Oval Office, acknowledging that the PGA Tour might “do something” to penalize the players “a little bit.”
But he reiterated that they’d find an accommodation. “They’ll all be back on tour, and it’ll be great.”
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