Golf deal promises benefits for Trump through Saudi ties

Tuesday’s surprise deal, which ended a civil war in the world of professional golf, benefits former President Donald J. Trump’s family business by raising the prospect that major tournaments will still be played on owned courses of Trump in the United States and perhaps abroad.

The outcome is the latest example of how the close relationship between Mr Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and Saudi Arabia, whose sovereign wealth fund is driving the turmoil in the gulf world, has proven beneficial to both sides, even though it has given rise to intense ethical scrutiny and political criticism.

Even as it has injected new money and competition into professional golf, Saudi Arabia has been accused of using its wealth to polish its global reputation and obscure its human rights record through sport. That campaign now appears to have provided business opportunities and a higher profile in the golf world for Mr. Trump as he seeks another term in the White House.

Since the formation of LIV Golf, the Saudi Arabian-funded breakaway professional golf circuit, Mr. Trump and his family have joined LIV against the PGA Tour at a time when the golf organization in the United States and Great Britain had moved to exclude Trump courses of major professional leagues, a trophy the Trump family has long sought.

The turn away from Mr. Trump and his courses only accelerated after the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Just days after the attack, PGA of America announced it was canceling a scheduled 2022 tournament at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, NJ that had been planned for years.

LIV quickly became the Trump family’s ticket back to the rarefied world of global tournaments, with events held last year at Bedminster and Trump National Doral, the family’s golf resort near Miami. This year, LIV brought tournaments to three Trump courses, adding Trump National Golf Club in Northern Virginia to the schedule.

The decision by professional golfers in the United States to shun Mr. Trump had enraged members of his family. Mr. Trump’s company had spent more than a decade acquiring or developing golf courses around the world for the purpose of hosting major tournaments that incentivize memberships by spotlighting the courses and lending some degree of legitimacy to the business. sports world could bestow on Mr. Trump, an avid golfer.

Dating back to when Mr. Trump was in the White House, he and his family have had unusually close ties to Saudi Arabia and the royal family there. His first foreign trip as president was to Riyadh, where he was warmly welcomed.

Trump later downplayed the Saudi government’s role in the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist, and defended Saudi Arabia’s long-running military campaign in neighboring Yemen while in office.

After Mr Trump left office, that relationship continued in the form of a $2 billion pledge from the Public Investment Fund — led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia — to an investment fund established by Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law. The Saudi fund also put $1 billion into a company run by Steven Mnuchin, who had been Trump’s secretary of the treasury.

LIV Golf is backed by the same Saudi fund. The head of the fund, Yasir al-Rumayyan, an avid golfer who also took on the role of LIV Golf, spent lavishly recruiting top professional players like Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka and big names like Phil Mickelson with $25 million purses and guaranteed contracts that sometimes amounted to $100 million or more.

But the new alliance between the PGA Tour and LIV will also only escalate questions about Mr. Trump and potential conflicts of interest, as he conducts business with foreign government agencies while also running for the White House again.

The Justice Department, as part of its investigation into Mr Trump’s handling of classified documents, has already subpoenaed the Trump Organization, seeking records of Mr Trump’s dealings with a LIV Gulf.

According to the agreement announced on Tuesday, Mr al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, will join the board of the PGA Tour. Mr. al-Rumayyan also said on Tuesday that the Saudi investment fund is ready to invest billions of dollars in the merged golf tournament.

On Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform and personal megaphone, he wrote, “Great news from LIV Golf. A big, beautiful and glamorous deal for the wonderful world of golf.”

Mr Trump’s son Eric Trump also welcomed the agreement in an interview on Tuesday, calling it “great for the game of golf”, adding that he expects tournaments to continue on Trump-owned courses once the merger is complete .

When asked if the Trump family played a role in spurring the PGA Tour and wealth fund to join forces, Eric Trump declined to comment. But he did say that over many years the family has developed close friends in the golfing world, including those on the PGA Tour and LIV.

The Trump family has been trying to get more of its golf courses to host LIV tournaments, including a club in Dubai and the Trump Turnberry golf resort in Scotland, venues it now hopes to see added to a reunited golf industry in the years to come.

This reflects the Trump family’s intense efforts to bring events to their golf courses, including in Scotland, which the British Open, one of golf’s premier professional tournaments, has repeatedly waived. While he was president, Mr. Trump enlisted the US ambassador to Britain to pressure, unsuccessfully, the British government to hold a tournament in Turnberry.

The payments from the LIV tournaments do not appear in Mr Trump’s financial disclosure report, which he filed in May, suggesting that the fees go directly to the individual golf clubs and are counted as part of their total earnings. The Trump family has not said how much they earn from LIV.

“Look, it’s peanuts to me. This is peanuts,” Trump said last month in an interview with reporters at his Virginia golf club at a LIV event, adding that “they pay rent. They want to use my properties because they are the best properties.”

In July, just before the first LIV tournament was played at Trump National Bedminster, Mr. Trump predicted that the rival golf tours would eventually merge, and suggested that players who remained loyal to the PGA Tour were making a financial mistake.

“All those golfers who remain ‘loyal’ to the deeply disloyal PGA, in all its various forms, will pay a heavy price when the inevitable MERGER with LIV comes, and you will get nothing but a big ‘thank you’ from PGA officials who earn millions of dollars a year, Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social in July 2022. “If you don’t take the money now, you’ll get nothing after the merger happens and you’re just saying how smart the original signatories were.”

In an interview last year at Trump National Doral when the LIV tournament was held there, Mr. Trump added that he was confident the Saudis would win the dispute.

“You’re not going to beat these people,” Trump said in October. “These people have amazing minds, they’re phenomenal people, and they have unlimited money — unlimited.”

There will be no immediate effect for Mr. Trump as the PGA and LIV tours continue independently at least for the time being, while this year’s LIV season continues as planned and the PGA sticks to the match venues it had already identified, a PGA Tour spokeswoman said Tuesday.

But his alliance with the Saudis poses some political risks for Mr. Trump as he campaigns to return to the White House.

The announcement of the LIV-PGA deal immediately sparked protests from a group called 9/11 Families United, which has pushed for further investigation into the origins of the 2001 terror attacks. The group cited Saudi Arabia’s efforts to develop professional golf enter “sportswashing” as part of a plan to improve the country’s human rights record and allegations that there were links between the hijackers and the Saudi government.

The leaders of the PGA Tour, a spokesman for 9/11 Families United said in a statement“appears to have just become more paid Saudi shills, which cost billions of dollars to clear the Saudi reputation,” a claim that also brought protesters to the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster last year when the LIV tournament was played there.

Connecticut Democrat Senator Christopher S. Murphy noted Tuesday that the PGA had long rejected any talk of a merger with LIV.

“PGA officials were in my office a few months ago to talk about how the Saudis should disqualify them from participating in a major American sport because of their human rights record,” he wrote on Twitter. “I think maybe their concerns weren’t really about human rights?”

Alan Blinder reporting contributed.