President Trump loves to play golf. He’s spent more time on the course than any other president at this point in his first term. The question is why. Understanding a man’s loves tells you something he’d probably rather you didn’t know.
Golf could be beautiful. A walk through swathes of green, extending for miles, like a recreation of the fields and meadows sung about by poets when poets still knew how to play the lute. The game itself adds a point of concentration within the ungovernable elements, an intermittent narrowing of awareness to how to align all the force one can muster toward a quick impact. There’s a joy in perfecting such a skill, no matter how inconsequential.
But look at how golf is actually played by Trump. He rides carts over unnatural carpets of green. The course starts and ends at an over-built clubhouse, weighed down with guilt ornations, over-dense foods, and a bar stocked with unlimited flavors of denial, where the object is to bury all questions in the ends of wealth. The men scattered over the lawn whacking little white balls back and forth have wagered on the results of each shot, as if letting an experience pass without monetary measure would frighten them. The holes are hemmed in by condos, architectural leeches sucking from a supine body.
Perhaps this is what Trump loves about golf—the extraction of wealth from what otherwise could be a pleasant pastime. We note that he seems to prefer to visit courses he owns—no doubt because they are the best, but also possibly because he luxuriates in the throb as money courses, as if out of the sky, the trees, and the grass, toward his bank account.