It’s fitting that Donald Trump has welcomed this rogue’s fair to his New Jersey swamp, where blackmailers, loaned sharks and shaken entertainers compete with fee-paying booths, landfills, and snooker snookers for propagation.
The US spin-off LIV Golf Invitational Series is back to smell a tattered, tattered sport in the midst of an identity crisis and a crisis of conscience through a 54-hole afterthought at the former president’s Trump National Course. Club in Bedminster, also known as “Summer White House” during the 45th scorched earth period, the singular period.
Criminal investigations in Congress, the Department of Justice and Georgia are being tightened over Trump’s plot to stay in power by lying that he won the 2020 election even though more than 7 million smoked in the popular vote. Accelerated investigations also reveal a diverse range of enablers and shoe practitioners who carried Trump’s betrayal to the steps of the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
All as Dear Leader is considering another presidential election in 2024, which could be a federal prison cell challenge. Wishful thinking, perhaps. But all the President’s rats will be looking for life jackets and plea bargains now that the iceberg has been hit.
You don’t want to be the last sycophant holding a MAGA hat when the indictment starts flying.
Against this backdrop, Trump — notorious for lying, cheating, and hacking golf — shut down Thursday with rude cashiers Dustin Johnson and Bryson Deschamps in the pro leading up to this weekend’s tournament.
Like Judge Elihu Smiles perfecting his Bushwood lie, Trump has shrugged off responsibility for helping the ruthless Saudi government “sportswashing” of its gruesome human rights record and its ties to the 15 9/11 hijackers by pretending all kinds of ignorance.
“Nobody got to the bottom of 9/11, unfortunately,” he told ESPN with a straight face.
Trump claimed that outrage over the 2018 murder and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which US intelligence services concluded was ordered and carried out by the Saudi government, has “completely faded”.
Nothing to see here. Just the state-sanctioned assassination of a Washington Post columnist had the nerve to criticize his regime’s brutality.
It is all part of the self-serving duplicity that Trump has perfected over decades of deceiving banks, landowners and voters into believing he has their best interests in mind. As he pulls every penny of graft from governments, taxpayers, and blind loyalists, he wonders what all the fuss is about.
Every time we think Trump has hit rock bottom, he grabs a jackhammer and drills deeper.
Like urinating in the face of the families of the September 11th victims. They are retreating. Difficult.
9/11 Families United has launched television advertisements and held press conferences calling on Trump to cancel the second LIV Golf event that has been held in the United States since he began peeling and paying high-profile PGA players and the rest for their show this summer.
Families are ramping up the pressure by protesting outside the land. They are also doing their due diligence in the media to remind deliberately ignorant check cashiers such as Johnson, DeChambeau, Phil Mickelson, Sergio Garcia, Brooks Kupka, Paul Casey, Ian Poulter, Louis Oosthuizen and LIV CEO, Greg Norman, of what they have joined.
“They’ve got their talking points. Their talking points are defending their actions to join the LIV Championship and saying the kingdom is not a bad actor,” Terry Strada, whose husband, Tom, works in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, told The Post.
“And we will challenge that. They misleadingly believe that now they can only say what they want to say about the kingdom.”
As long as Uncle Sam swings on Saudi oil, this country has to deal with that kingdom, no matter how many presidents keep chopping them up in the Arabian desert.
Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, is no different. He had to kiss the sheikh’s ring earlier this month despite similar protests from victims of this ruthless tyranny.
The Saudis can print money and finance the LIV Golf until the flow of black gold stops, or take advantage of the energy independence that has eluded the West for a century.
Crooks like Trump will always line up at the gutter. Don’t subscribe for a second to his altruistic impulse about expanding golf’s footprint and providing greater potential to win more players.
It’s about Trump and revenge on the PGA Tour, who pulled the 2016 PGA Championship off one of his tournaments and cut ties with the former president’s little boy after January 6.
Trump’s legal account is coming. The moral reckoning for LIV golfers is already upon them.
You can read more from Brian Murphy here.