The world’s greediest golfers joined America’s greatest grifter this week to jab middle fingers into 9/11 survivors’ eyes, the PGA Tour and anyone shaming these feckless deniers for cashing Saudi blood money behind a fig leaf of autonomy.
Fitting that Donald Trump welcomed this rogue’s gallery to his kickback swamp in New Jersey, where racketeers, loan sharks and shakedown artists compete with toll booths, landfills and schnockered Snookis for prevalence.
The breakaway LIV Golf Invitational Series is back in the United States to stink up a stuffy and fractured sport in the throes of an identity crisis and crisis of conscience via a shotgun-style, 54-hole afterthought at the disgraced former president’s private Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, a.k.a. the “Summer White House” during No. 45’s scorched-earth, singular term.
Congressional, Justice Department and Georgia criminal investigations are tightening around Trump’s plot to stay in power by lying that he won the 2020 Election despite getting smoked in the popular vote by more than 7 million. The accelerating probes also are exposing a diverse field of enablers and bootlickers who carried Trump’s treason to the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
All as Dear Leader contemplates another presidential run in 2024, which might prove challenging from a federal prison cell. Wishful thinking, perhaps. But All The President’s Rats will be scurrying for life vests and plea deals now that the iceberg has been struck.
You do not want to be the last sycophant holding a MAGA hat when the indictments start flying.
Against that backdrop, Trump – a notorious lying, cheating, golfing hack – teed off Thursday with shameless money changers Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau in the pro-am preceding this weekend tournament.
Like Judge Elihu Smails improving his lie at Bushwood, Trump deflected responsibility for helping the ruthless Saudi Arabian government “sportswash” its heinous human rights record and ties to 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers by feigning all kinds of ignorance.
“Nobody’s gotten to the bottom of 9/11, unfortunately,” he told ESPN with a straight face.
Trump claimed the furor around the 2018 murder and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which U.S. intelligence services concluded was ordered and carried out by the Saudi government, had “totally died down.”
Nothing to see here. Just the state-sanctioned assassination of a Washington Post columnist who had the audacity to criticize his regime’s brutality.
All part and parcel of the self-serving duplicity Trump has mastered over decades of duping banks, land owners and voters into believing he has their best interests in mind. While skimming every penny of graft he can from governments, taxpayers and blind loyalists and wondering what all the fuss is about.
Every time we think Trump has hit rock bottom, he grabs a jackhammer and drills deeper.
Like pissing in the face of 9/11 victims’ families. They are shoving back. Hard.
9/11 Families United has run television ads and held news conferences demanding Trump cancel the second LIV Golf event held in the United States since it started peeling and paying off marquee PGA players and has-beens to showcase this summer.
The families are dialing up the pressure by protesting outside the grounds. They also are doing due diligence in the media to remind willfully ignorant check cashers like Johnson, DeChambeau, Phil Mickelson, Sergio Garcia, Brooks Koepka, Paul Casey, Ian Poulter, Louis Oosthuizen and LIV chief executive Greg Norman what they have aligned themselves with.
“They’ve been given their talking points. And their talking points are to defend their actions for joining the LIV tournament and to say that the kingdom is not a bad actor,” Terry Strada, whose husband, Tom, worked in the World Trade Center’s North Tower, told the Post.
“And we’re going to challenge that. They are misguided thinking that they can just now say what they want to say about the kingdom.”
As long as Uncle Sam is puckered on the tit of Saudi oil, this country has to deal with that kingdom, no matter how many heads they keep chopping off in the Arabian desert.
Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, is no different. He had to kiss the sheik’s ring earlier this month despite similar protests from victims of this merciless autocracy.
The Saudis can print money and bankroll LIV Golf until the black gold stops flowing or we leverage energy independence that has eluded the West for a century.
And con men like Trump will always be lining up at the trough. Do not for a second buy in to his altruistic motives about expanding golf’s footprint and providing greater earning potential for more players.
This is about Trump and exacting revenge against the PGA Tour, which took the 2016 PGA Championship away from one of his courses and severed ties with the petulant former toddler in chief after Jan. 6.
Trump’s legal reckoning is coming. The moral reckoning for LIV golfers is already upon them.
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