A Game Without Pity (But A Lot Of Cheating)

The socially redeeming aspect of golf lies in the vast number of lawyers and bankers and managers who play it, and when you think of the damage they would do if they were at the job instead, you can see why golf courses are a wise investment for any municipality.

So Trump is at Turnberry filming an Emoluments Clause breaking Infomercial on yet another looming bankruptcy. One can, I suppose, take a small amount of satisfaction that his tiny hands and feeble mind are not fixed on some whim of greater destructive capacity.

In Trump’s U.K. Visit, Some See ‘Infomercial’ for Money-Losing Golf Resort
By Katie Rogers, The New York Times
July 14, 2018

Mr. Trump was ensconced at Trump Turnberry, the luxury Scottish resort where he is staying, from members of the American news media who traveled with him here — but not from British journalists, who captured protesters on a nearby beach shouting, “No Trump, no K.K.K., no racist U.S.A.” at him as he teed off on Saturday.

The group chanted across windswept grasslands and a protective buffer of dozens of law enforcement officials, some of whom were on horseback. According to footage captured by the BBC, the president appeared to wave at the crowd before turning back to his golf game.

Before arriving in Scotland — the birthplace of his mother, as well as that of Mr. Trump’s preferred pastime — the president managed repeatedly to plug Turnberry, one of two Scottish resorts that bear his name, as he dealt with some of the most pressing diplomacy problems facing his administration to date.

It is a tactic that has alarmed ethics watchdogs, who say he is using his presidential platform to promote a resort that, according to financial filings, has been a burden on the family business.

While the president has blazed a chaotic streak through Europe this past week, Turnberry has received special recognition amid other Trump-issued sound bites that analysts say have undermined the United States’ relationships with close NATO allies.

At a hastily arranged news conference in Brussels, when asked to discuss his message for Britain on its exit from the European Union, Mr. Trump said he had none — a thought he would later undermine in stunning fashion in an interview splashed on the cover of the British tabloid The Sun. Then, Mr. Trump wove in a reference to Turnberry, on breathtaking bluffs and cliffs on the western coast of Scotland, calling it “magical” and “one of my favorite places.”

Mr. Trump said he would be taking calls and meetings ahead of the planned gathering with Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Finland. But around the time he hit one of the resort’s two golf courses on Saturday, his official account began posting on Twitter.

In two tweets, he blamed the Obama administration, not Russia, for the hacking and again suggested that a Democratic “deep state” was afoot.

He also plugged the Turnberry golf course again: “The weather is beautiful,” he wrote on Twitter, “and this place is incredible!”

Ethics experts tend to be cynical about the president’s sentimental references to his resort: His arrival at Turnberry marks the 169th day during his presidency that he has visited a property owned, managed or branded by the Trump Organization. Financial records show the resort has lost money since Mr. Trump purchased it in 2014.

“I view this as kind of a forced subsidy of an infomercial for his properties,” Norman L. Eisen, the chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in an interview on Friday. “He’s attempting to utilize his trip to get beneficial P.R.”

Before Mr. Trump left for Scotland on Friday, he again brought up Turnberry during a news conference in England with Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain.

“I was opening Turnberry the day before Brexit,” Mr. Trump said, “and all they wanted to talk about was Brexit, and I said, ‘I think Brexit would happen,’ and it did happen.”

Mr. Trump, in fact, arrived at Turnberry the day after Britons voted in 2016 to leave the European Union, but he spoke about his resort for 15 minutes before he took questions on Brexit at a news conference. He also expressed skepticism when asked if the referendum would send shock waves through the global markets.

“Look, if the pound goes down, they’re going to do more business,” Mr. Trump said then. “When the pound goes down, more people are coming to Turnberry, frankly.”

Although Mr. Trump has claimed to have spent at least 200 million pounds, about $264 million, on Turnberry to buy and renovate it since 2014 — a figure that has not been verified independently — the course has yet to turn a profit.

In fact, the Turnberry operation has lost tens of millions of pounds since he purchased it, filings in Britain show: about £17 million in 2016, the last year for which such comprehensive records are available. For 2017, Mr. Trump’s government ethics filing discloses only how much revenue the course generated — $20.4 million — not whether it had earned a profit.

This is not the first time that Mr. Trump has visited a Trump-owned resort while traveling in his capacity as president. On a 13-day trip through Asia, the president swung by the Trump International Hotel Waikiki resort for a 10-minute visit.

“The president stopped by the Trump Hotel on his way to the airport,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement at the time. “It has been a tremendously successful project, and he wanted to say hello and thank you to the employees for all their hard work.”

An analysis of that trip by The Associated Press showed that Mr. Trump’s stopover cost American taxpayers almost $141,000, or more than $100 a minute. The president’s hotel stop itself cost taxpayers $1,000.

Mr. (Norman) Eisen, the chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, takes a more skeptical view. He serves as co-counsel in a lawsuit accusing the president of violating constitutional anticorruption clauses intended to limit his receipt of government-bestowed benefits, or emoluments.

He sees the Trump family’s efforts this past week as part a broader and problematic effort to use the presidency to gin up interest in the property.

“Through this trip to Turnberry,” Mr. Eisen said, “the president is forcing his foreign hosts and the United States to spend enormous amounts of money so that he can get free advertising for his resort.”

“He’s the master of earned media,” Mr. Eisen added. “It’s an important part of the way he won the presidency, and that’s what he’s doing here.”