Commander in Cheat

by Rick Reilly

  No current or former LPGA commissioner would talk about Trump for this chapter, but when Trump was tweeting angrily on the day of Senator John McCain’s dramatic Washington, D.C. funeral, former LPGA commissioner Carolyn Bivens (2005–2009) tweeted:

  The depths of depravity know no bounds with Trump. Clueless and classless

  Eventually, all good things must come to an end. After five years, the ADT tournament announced they’d be switching venues. Naturally, Trump sent them off with all best wishes.

  “Just think,” he said to a group of them that year, “next year at this time you’ll be in a freaking Holiday Inn outside Houston.”

  When 33-time Tour winner Amy Alcott met Trump the first time, she was in the hotel elevator at the now-defunct Trump Marina casino in New Jersey. She’d made an ace that day at an LPGA event and was beaming. Trump got in the elevator and recognized her.

  “Are you a golfer?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m Amy Alcott.”

  “Of course you are! I’m a big fan.”

  “Thanks! I actually had a hole in one today.”

  “Wow. That’s fantastic. I’m going to have some champagne sent up.”

  “Wow. Thank you!”’

  “Are you paying for your room?”

  “Well, yes, of course.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t be. We’ll take care of it.”

  Alcott was flattered and thankful. Except no champagne ever arrived. And nobody ever took care of the room but her. “But I did see him leave in his helicopter,” Alcott says.

  They’d meet again when the LPGA held an event at his one-and-done Trump Los Angeles in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. “He’d put me in his cart,” says Alcott. “And since it’s Donald’s cart, it goes twice as fast as any cart. We’re driving down the middle of the freaking fairway DURING the tournament. One time, he goes, ‘Oh, there goes Lorena Ochoa!’ and he drove right down the middle of the fairway and up to the green. There was Ochoa trying to line up a birdie putt and he’s waving and going, ‘Hi Lorena! How you playing?’”

  Longtime LPGA touring pro Kris Tschetter was even less impressed than Alcott. She and Trump played together in a Wednesday Pro-Am once at the ShopRite Classic in New Jersey. “In my 25 years being a Tour pro,” Tschetter says, “that was the worst experience I ever had playing golf.”

  Trump leered at her, spoke suggestively, and was “gross,” Tschetter says. “He was just a pig. He hit on me, but in a kind of creepy way. I was SO not interested. I guess the fact I was married didn’t matter to him. I was just like, ‘Ewwwww’ the rest of the round.”

  One of the other players in the group that day, a sales executive named Rob (he prefers not to give his last name), says it was worse than that. “Not only was he hitting on Kris, but Kris’s husband was caddying! Trump would take me aside and go, ‘What do you know about Kris and her husband?’ I’m like, ‘How should I know? He’s right over there.’”

  Since it was a tournament, he played by the rules, right?

  “No, he kept taking all these extra shots,” Tschetter says. “You can’t do that in a Pro-Am. At one point, we made a 5 (as a team) and he said to write down a 4 because ‘everybody cheats in Pro-Ams.’ I mean, he couldn’t be stopped. There was no way to say ‘no’ to him.”

  Rob: “I kept saying to him, ‘Why are you cheating? To win an umbrella?’ I wouldn’t do it, so he took over the scorecard.”

  But here’s the amazing thing about that day. After all the boorishness, Trump sent his helicopter to take them on a tour of New York, land on the roof of one of his buildings, wait while they ate dinner below, and bring them back to New Jersey, all on him. He wasn’t even there.

  It’s not the money, it’s the winning.

  Just because the LPGA was done with him didn’t mean Trump was done with the ladies. He lobbied for and got the 2017 U.S. Women’s Open at Bedminster. The deal was signed long before he ran for president, and when he did, his first comment accused Mexico of sending us mostly rapists. Then came the Access Hollywood tape in which he boasts to Billy Bush about “grabbing women by the pussy.” Then came the debate question from Fox’s Megyn Kelly asking him why he has called women “slobs,” “dogs,” and “fat pigs.”

  LPGA and USGA officials stewed. How could they hold a women’s Open hosted by a man whose idea of women came from Porky’s 6? It was like riding a lion. They’d get eaten alive if they stayed on, but they’d get eaten alive if they didn’t. They decided to just hold the tournament and hope for the best.

  Immediately, women’s groups started applying heat. A month before it was to start, a group called UltraViolet rented a plane and flew a banner over the men’s U.S. Open that year that read: “USGA/LPGA: TAKE A MULLIGAN, DUMP TRUMP.”

  (Aside to Greenpeace: Please call UltraViolet from now on for all golf-banner wording.)

  Women’s pro golf was finally getting some press, just all the wrong kind. Media rooms at normally ignored LPGA events were filling up with reporters, all wanting to ask the players, “How do you feel about playing the Open at Donald Trump’s golf course?”

  American Brittany Lincicome shrugged and said, “Hopefully maybe he doesn’t show up.”

  It’d be a great slogan, wouldn’t it?

  The 2017 U.S. Women’s Open: Hopefully, Trump won’t show up.

  But he did show up. He drove past hundreds of protesters outside the gate and became the first U.S. president to ever attend a U.S. Women’s Open. He sat in a corporate tent on the 18th green behind bulletproof glass and waved a lot. The Open was won by South Korean Park Sung-hyun, as if anybody remembers in the midst of the Trump Tornado.

  When it was over, he tweeted:

  Thank you to all of the supporters, who far out-numbered the protesters, yesterday at the Women’s U.S. Open. Very cool!

  One last note: Through the first 22 months of his presidency, there wasn’t a single documented round when he’d played golf with a woman.

  14

  WHO’S YOUR CADDIES?

  If a caddy can help you, you don’t know how to play golf.

  —DAN JENKINS

  THE MOST LOYAL EMPLOYEE Donald J. Trump has doesn’t work in the White House or on his campaign or on his legal team. The most faithful man in the president’s life is his caddy at Trump Washington, a 60-something ex-Marine named A.J.

  A.J. (he’d prefer we not use his last name) is so loyal that if you criticize Trump, he’ll fight you—and has. One day, when the 2017 Senior PGA Championship was being held at Trump Washington, he overhead one of the Tour pro’s caddies—Brian “Sully” Sullivan—dissing Trump.

  “He was running his mouth, sir,” says A.J., who calls everybody “sir” or “ma’am.” “Yellin’ about Mr. Trump. He was sayin’ to somebody, ‘Don’t tell me how I have to feel about him! I hate that motherfucker!’”

  A.J. says he came up on Sully from behind and put him in a full military choke hold, yelling, “Now, you listen to me, fucker! You’re not gonna come to Mr. Trump’s course and eat Mr. Trump’s food and then use the word ‘hate’ about my president. I won’t have it, you got me?”

  That’s not quite the way the story is told by Sullivan, who caddies for Senior Tour player Joe Durant, but his memory is a little fuzzy. “It’s possible I was hungover,” Sullivan recalls. “I don’t like D.C. anyway and I sure as hell didn’t want to be on a Trump course. Some guys started talking about Trump. I mentioned that I can’t stand the son of a bitch. I said he was the biggest jerk in the world. A.J. got all worked up and said, ‘That man pays my rent. He puts food on my table!’ I said if he has to take money from that horse’s ass, then he ought to find a different loop. He kind of just grumbled off. Of course, as luck would have it, he and I got paired for the first two days. We buried the hatchet.”

  Tensions were high because, for seniors, it was a big tournament and Trump’s name was attached to it. There were protesters by the entrance every day that week, and A.J. always made sure to drive his car right by them.
“There’d be a bunch a women out front with all their stupid signs, sir. So I go real slow by ’em, see, hit the window button—zzzzzzttt—toss ’em the bird and I yell, ‘Fuck you!’ They’d start yelling at me and I’m like—zzzztttt—right back up. And I laughed, sir.”

  A.J. sticks with Trump no matter how much it costs him. “I used to caddy for a lot of the ladies here, sir,” he says. “But once Mr. Trump won the election, that all ended. Now I hardly do it at all, sir. I guess they don’t like him. I’m the president’s caddy and they’re not gonna ask for me, sir. So that’s it.”

  One time, after a bad drive, Trump slammed his driver back in his bag, as guys will do, and wasn’t really watching what he was doing, and the driver ricocheted back and hit Trump in the head. “A.J.?” Trump asked, pissed. “Did you just hit me in the head with my own driver?”

  “Sir, Mr. Trump, why would I do that?” A.J. said. “You’re my president!”

  There are more than a few members at Trump Washington who’d love to hit Trump in the head. A valet told me, “We had a bunch of them quit when he won.” Most of the anti-Trump crowd stayed, but they resist in their own small ways. Every time one member sees A.J., he says, “Is this the day, A.J.? Is this the day?”

  “Is this the day for what, sir?”

  “Is this the day you take him out for me?”

  “This one time, we’re playing through, sir, like we do and, you know, usually the Secret Service has the people standing on the side in plenty of time for us. But this one guy, sir, young guy by the name of Jonathan Wallace, he was taking his sweet time getting out of the way. He was just moseying along, sir, doing it on purpose. Then he gives it one of these (A.J. flips the bird), right to Mr. Trump. Sir, that really made me mad. Mr. Trump just asked me who it was. I told him. He said, ‘Let’s go say hello.’ Not me, sir. I went the other way. But Mr. Trump went over there and talked to him. Right away, this Wallace guy caved, sir. He caved.” (I couldn’t get Jonathan Wallace to call me back to hear his side of it.)

  None of this used to be A.J.’s life. His Trump days used to be filled with pro athletes or businessmen. Now it’s Congressmen and Fox hosts. Among his favorite these days is South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican. “I love hearing that accent of his, sir. Mr. Trump plays pretty good with him. One time, he taught Mr. Trump a game called ‘Hogan.’ A Hogan is when you hit the fairway and the green and then two-putt. You do that, you get one Hogan point. So we played it, and, bam, Mr. Trump gets a Hogan on the first hole. And he just keeps going. Mr. Trump got 11 Hogans, sir! Shot 73 that day, I kid you not, sir. He made about four 15-to 20-foot putts on the back and shot 73. Coulda been even lower.”

  A one-over par 73 on a “wet and windy day” as Graham described it, for a 72-year-old overweight man? That’s freaking unbelievable. How unbelievable? Well, at that same Senior PGA Championship, at the same course, from the same blue tees, Tom Watson never shot better than 74. Tom Kite put up a 75 and an 80. Corey Pavin had an 82. Between them, those three men have won nine majors.

  When asked by a reporter how many gimmes there were in that 73, Graham allowed that they didn’t really putt out that often and that “the president is better at receiving than giving.” So, in other words, that 73 had more sugar in it than a family pack of Butterfingers. Now why would Graham resort to telling the truth about Trump’s scorekeeping skills? Perhaps because of the vitriol Trump tweeted about him during the 2016 campaign, calling him “nasty” and “so easy to beat” and a man with “no honor.”

  Now, though, Graham is No. 1 on Trump’s golf speed dial. Graham remembers legendary Republican Senator John McCain asking him why he kept playing golf with someone like Trump. “I told him, ‘I hope you understand.… The best place to talk to him is in his world.’”

  A.J. had Trump and Tennessee Republican senator Bob Corker in his world one day—along with no less than QB Peyton Manning—but it didn’t seem to grease any wheels for his boss in Congress. Not long afterward, Corker said Trump needed “adult daycare.”

  A.J. has no time for another Republican senator, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, whom he calls “a real chooch.”

  A chooch?

  “Yeah, I don’t know how to translate it, sir. A chooch. He treated me like a peon. Never even tried to fix a ballmark. Treated me like dirt, sir. He’s a rich guy who thinks he’s above everybody. A real chooch, sir.” (Paul didn’t return calls.)

  Paul didn’t sound like he had that much fun playing with Trump and A.J., either. When asked who won the golf match, Paul said, “The President never loses, didn’t you know?”

  Actually, yes, that’s been mentioned.

  In my 18 holes with A.J., he didn’t say a single negative thing about Trump. He didn’t even say a neutral thing about Trump. To hear A.J. tell it, Trump has Einstein’s brain, Lincoln’s wit, and Nightingale’s heart. A.J. is smart that way. A loyal caddy can go a long, long way with Donald Trump.

  Take Dan Scavino.

  Scavino was a 16-year-old summer caddy when he got Trump’s bag one day in 1990 at Briar Hall Golf and Country Club (NY), which was to become Trump Westchester. “I’ll never forget the day his limo first pulled up,” Scavino told Westchester Magazine. “I was star-struck. I remember his first gratuity. It was two bills—two hundred-dollar bills. I said, ‘I am never spending this money.’ I still have both bills.”

  The two hit it off. Trump told him, “You’re gonna work for me one day.” Scavino graduated from State University of New York (Plattsburgh) in 1998 and went to work for Coca-Cola, but Trump brought him back soon enough to be the assistant general manager at Westchester. Then Scavino became executive vice president. When Trump decided to run for president, Scavino asked if he could be part of it. Trump made him social media director of the campaign.

  A billionaire and a caddy is a friendship that could only be made in golf, where kings take orders from cobblers and lifetime allegiances are sealed over 6 irons. It was the perfect match. Scavino is Trump’s Mini Me. They both speak fluent golf. They both love stirring up liberals. They are both often very short on details and understanding, but long on Atomic Pile Driver slams and face-first personal takedowns. “They share thumbs,” former campaign advisor Barry Bennett says. “They complete each other’s tweets.” Neither is well read nor a particularly good speller. Doesn’t matter. As a two-man Twitter team, they shout from the rooftops anyway. They find a phrase—“fake news” or “enemy of the people” or “Crooked Hillary”—and repeat it so many times, people start to accept it.

  With Scavino running Trump’s feed, Trump’s tweets became even more bombastic, ultra-opinionated, and, often, a par 5 over the line. Former White House communications czar Hope Hicks called Scavino “the conductor of the Trump Train.” One day, the train jumped the tracks. Trump tweeted out an image of Hillary Clinton, with a Star of David, against a background of money and the line “Most corrupt candidate ever!” It was a Scavino special, cobbled together with cut-and-paste images from the Internet and no thought of maybe asking somebody, “Hey, is this too much?”

  Within seconds, Trump was blasted as antisemitic. Scavino had to issue a statement taking responsibility. He tweeted:

  The social media graphic used this weekend was not created by the campaign. It was lifted from an Anti-Hillary Twitter user. The sheriff’s badge, which is available under Microsoft shapes, fit the theme of corrupt Hillary and that is why I selected it.

  Except it wasn’t a sheriff’s badge, it was a Jewish star. (It was probably a mistake on Scavino’s part, since his wife is Jewish.) The more Scavino pumped up Trump’s tweets, the more it sounded like the Twitter feed of somebody else—Scavino’s. For instance, on March 2, 2016, Scavino tweeted on his own account:

  @MittRomney, You will not stop the #TrumpTrain You look like a complete LOSER. Very DESPERATE attempt. #Fail

  Hmmm. That’s got a certain ring to it. Another time, just days before the election, Scavino tweeted:

  NBC news is #FakeNews and mo
re dishonest than even CNN. They are a disgrace to good reporting. No wonder their news ratings are way down!

  A minute later, the same message, word for word, was posted on Trump’s account as his original tweet. Scavino hastily deleted his, but in a world of screenshots, it was too late.

  Robert Draper, of the New York Times Magazine, conducted an exhaustive study of Trump’s tweets and estimated that Scavino was “responsible for—at least as a ‘co-conspirator’”—about half of Trump’s 37,000 tweets. The late-night and early-morning tweets seem to be 100% Trump, but the daytime stuff has the patina of Scavino. Whichever it is, neither of them particularly knows what they’re doing. Scavino violated the Hatch Act by tweeting support for a candidate. Scavino also got Trump dragged to Federal District Court by blocking some followers, which, it turns out, is unconstitutional for an American president.

  Still, he’s put Trump’s Twitter rants on a kind of steroid regimen. Fox News host Megyn Kelly accused Scavino of rabble-rousing against her: “The vast majority of Donald Trump supporters are not at all this way,” Kelly told an audience in Washington. “It’s that far corner of the Internet that really enjoys nastiness and threats and unfortunately there is a man who works for Donald Trump whose job it is to stir these people up and that man needs to stop doing that. His name is Dan Scavino.”

  But just think of it: Trump’s Twitter feed is the most powerful pulpit on the globe, and a caddy has his hands on it, daily. It’s full-throated Trumpness, even Trumpier than Trump, sent without censure or concern and teeming with what Bush 41 called Trump’s “casual cruelty.” It’s a flamethrower that sometimes winds up setting the Oval Office curtains on fire. During his 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney had 22 people approve each tweet before it went out. During the day, Trump has two—himself and his caddy. At night, just one. That’s not going to change. CNN asked Scavino, who is now the White House Director of Communications, if there was anything Trump could do or say that would make him leave Trump’s side. He answered with an unequivocal “no.”