Donald Trump was re-elected as President of the United States in 2025.
Having been replaced by Joe Biden in 2021, Trump won a second election, and his steps will be heard once more in the American corridors of power.
The billionaire businessman has a longstanding presence in golf that precedes his journey to the Oval Office. Acquiring his first golf course in West Palm Beach in 1999, the 78-year-old has built an award-winning portfolio of golf resorts that span across Ireland, Scotland, America, Dubai, Indonesia and Oman.
In 2022, the LIV Golf League, funded by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, held an event at Trump’s Bedminster in New Jersey. Trump National Golf Club Washington DC and Trump National Doral have since featured on the rebel circuit’s schedule.
Opportunity knocked for the President and the same could now be said for the sport in general if Trump’s comments on the Let’s Go Podcast with Jim Gray and Bill Belichick are anything to go by.
LIV’s inception rocked the pro golf boat to the point where the PGA Tour and DP World Tour suspended players for joining the breakaway league. A framework agreement was announced between the Public Investment Fund, LIV’s primary investors, and the PGA Tour in June 2023 to call a truce, but an official compromise is yet to be signed. This is where Trump thinks he can help:
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Donald Trump: LIV Golf deal could be done in ‘better part of 15 minutes’
“Well, I’m going to really work on other things, to be honest with you… I think we have much bigger problems than that,” he said.
“But I do think we should have one tour, and they should have the best players in that tour – meaning you have many tours, but your primary tour, because when Scottie (Scheffler) wins or when they win on the other tour, we have a lot of – there’s a lot of great players. I mean, beyond great. It’s really top, top players on LIV.
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“It would be nice if they could all play together. It’s terrible when somebody’s shut out of a major. It’s terrible. But they’re very happy with Saudi Arabia. They’re over there and they’re very happy about it. They really are. It’s amazing.
“If you speak to them, they’re happy with their decisions. They made more money than they probably could ever have made. They got cheques from, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars. So it’s hard to say, Gee, I’m going to be happy because I can’t play in a certain location. That’s not that important.
“But I think it’ll come together. Yeah, I could certainly help, but I could probably get it done. I would say it would take me the better part of 15 minutes to get that deal done.”
What one person, even the President of America, could do to connect the pieces of this remarkably confusing puzzle is yet to be seen. But a promising update was delivered on February 7 by tour commissioner Jay Monahan and player directors Tiger Woods and Adam Scott.
“We know golf fans are eagerly anticipating a resolution to negotiations with the Public Investment Fund and want to thank President Trump for his interest and long-time support of the game of golf,” the statement read.
“We asked the President to get involved for the good of the game, the good of the country, and for all the countries involved. We are grateful that his leadership has brought us closer to a final deal, paving the way for reunification of men’s professional golf.”
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Rory McIlroy, the World No.3 and a figure at the heart of discussions between both parties, named the US Department of Justice as a stumbling block in progress towards a deal. Perhaps the boundary where sport crosses into US politics is where Trump feels he could intervene.
Trump’s first foreign visit as US President in 2017 was to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, a significant choice for an opening trip of his opening reign. He seemingly maintained his relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the four years he wasn’t in office too.
There is the accommodation of LIV events at his golf courses, plus a Saudi investment worth $2 billion into Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s private equity firm. Trump’s support and endorsement of bin Salman has rarely dwindled.
In the hope that golf is within a realistic radius of the DOJ’s top priority list, perhaps Trump could be the unexpected answer to the game’s conundrum, given his relationship with the Kingdom, that the Sun reported to be resolved at the start of November 2024. McIlroy subsequently responded to this story to say it was “the first he’d heard of it.”
What could be the PGA Tour and the PIF’s gain will be to Turnberry’s detriment. Once a Scottish host venue of The Open, the R&A are steely in their stance not to go back under the American’s ownership, despite the Ailsa course’s growing quality and high praise from all angles.
“I think it will,” Sky Sports commentator Ewen Murray told NCG, believing the Open will indeed go to Turnberry again one day.
“Trump won’t be around forever. I have met Donald Trump on a couple of occasions, and I never say it, but I was very impressed with him as a person. If I look into his politics, which nothing in my life is politics, I don’t do politics or religion because they cause trouble and because people have opinions on them, and their opinions won’t change. But whoever owns the course really wouldn’t matter because that week belongs to the R&A, and it belongs to golf fans across the world.
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“That Monday to Sunday, it belongs to them. It’s not associated with someone else, it’s the R&A and the home of golf and the people who make the rules and everything we enjoy in golf, everything we adhere to in golf, so I would take the owner out of the way and look at it and if it hasn’t got the infrastructure for a modern Open, then fine we don’t go there, we’ll go somewhere that does.”
McIlroy, who has played the role of the PGA Tour’s public defender and has been caught in indirect verbal battles with ex-LIV Golf chief Greg Norman, believes Trump could be rather useful in golf’s deadlock, as he has allied with the Crown Prince.
“He can do a lot of things – He has direct access to Yasir’s boss. Not many people have that. Not many people can say, I want you to get this deal done and by the way, I’m speaking to your boss, I’m going to tell him the same
thing. There’s a few things that he can do. He can be influential,” McIlroy said at the 2025 Genesis Invitational.
“He loves the game of golf – I was playing with Sheik Hamdan of Abu Dhabi the day when he got elected in November and the respect he has in the Middle East – I don’t think people appreciate how much respect that he has there. So I think whenever he says something or he — they listen and I think that’s a big thing.”
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McIlroy even played with Trump at the start of 2025:
“It was really good, it was really good. I thought we had a good discussion. I learnt that he’s not a fan of the LIV format. I was like, but you’ve hosted their events. He was like, yeah, but it doesn’t mean that I like it. So I think he’s on the Tour’s side.”
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