With the LIV Golf in view, this week at Donald Trump’s New Jersey golf club, the biggest scandals rocking foreign relations and sports are colliding, with the former President getting sucked into the turmoil.
The third LIV Golf event will take place at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster beginning on Friday. LIV Golf is a new professional circuit supported by Saudi Arabia that has shocked the PGA Tour by luring famous golfers away with bigger, guaranteed payouts.
In the weeks leading up to the competition this weekend, Trump has praised the event in interviews and public remarks, enticing golfers to sign up with LIV Golf and criticizing the PGA Tour.
Trump is gaining from his business partnership with LIV Golf, particularly after PGA of America executives decided to move the 2022 PGA Championship from Bedminster as a result of the unrest that broke out at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The last LIV Golf event of the year will take place in October at the South Florida Trump National Doral.
However, despite worries from activists, media outlets, and others that LIV Golf legitimizes the Saudi Arabian government, which has long been accused of violating human rights, Trump has dismissed these complaints.
He spoke favorably about how the golf tour, which is supported by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, has already enhanced the country’s profile in an interview with The Wall Street Journal earlier this week.
Media outlets and human rights organizations have questioned LIV Golf’s organizers and competitors over the tour’s ties to Saudi Arabia. Several of the inquiries have focussed on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributor, in 2018.
According to a US intelligence report made public last year, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman gave the go-ahead for the operation to kidnap or murder the Saudi journalist, corroborating claims made shortly after the journalist’s death that the CIA had reached the same conclusion.
But as his administration improved US relations with Saudi Arabia, Trump publicly played down claims that bin Salman was involved.
But several 9/11 survivors and the relatives of those who perished in the terrorist attacks have taken issue with LIV Golf’s event in Bedminster.
Terry Strada, head of 9/11 Families United, stated on Tuesday at a news conference close to Bedminster that the organization was “appalled” by the “offensive, insulting, and hurtful” tournament at Trump’s club, which is only 50 miles from the scene of the 2001 New York attack.
Trump, according to Strada, has left her “extremely upset,” although she pointed out that the group’s criticism did not primarily focus on him.
The PGA Tour, which has suspended players who have joined LIV Golf, as well as some of golf’s biggest names, including Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, have criticized the new circuit.
The PGA Tour’s hegemony is threatened by LIV Golf, whose allure for elite players includes higher purses and guaranteed payouts, and which appears to have taken the established organization off guard.
Trump, who has had a contentious history with the PGA Tour, appears to be relishing the harm done to the organization. The PGA Tour hasn’t held an event at a Trump property since a competition at Doral in March 2016.
His clubs have, however, hosted PGA and other professional golf events in the past. And Trump has had his eye on the group ever since he stripped Bedminster of the 2022 PGA Championship.
