‘Quite the accomplishment’: Joe Biden pokes fun at Trump’s alleged golf wins
Joe Biden clapped back at Donald Trump after Trump posted a typically bizarre boast about his self-proclaimed golfing prowess.
“Congratulations, Donald,” the president told his Republican rival. “Quite the accomplishment.”
Sarcasm is hard to type but it surely suffused Biden’s words, which were posted to the platform formerly known as Twitter as part of what appears to be a broader strategy from the Biden campaign of taunting and ridiculing Trump over his legal and financial problems.
Trump made his typically capitalssplattered boast about a supposed great golfing victory on Truth Social, the platform he started when Twitter banned him for inciting the January 6 attack on Congress.
“It is my great honour,” the former president wrote, “to be at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach tonight, AWARDS NIGHT, to receive THE CLUB CHAMPIONSHIP TROPHY & THE SENIOR CLUB CHAMPIONSHIP TROPHY. I WON BOTH!
“A large and golfing talented membership, a GREAT and difficult course, made the play very exciting. The qualifying and match play was amazing … Very exciting, thank you!!!”
Biden’s tweet followed. Many other social media users quoted Rick Reilly, a former Sports Illustrated columnist and author of Commander in Cheat: How
Golf Explains Trump.
Reilly, who has played with the former president, has described how Trump “cheats like a mafia accountant”, including “kick[ing] the ball out of the rough so many times, the caddies call him Pele”, taking endless free shots and falsifying scores.
On Sunday, Reilly told Trump: “Call us if you ever win one on a course you DON’T own and operate.”
Trump’s dubious claims to honours and titles at his own courses are well documented. Notably, his West Palm Beach club was revealed in 2017 to list him as its 1999 champion. It opened in 2000.
Away from the fairways, Trump secured the Republican nomination to face Biden again this year despite facing 88 criminal charges, multimillion-dollar civil penalties and attempts to remove him from the ballot.
On Monday, Trump faces a hearing in his New York criminal case over hush-money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels – who he met at a celebrity golf event in Nevada – and a deadline to pay a $454m bond in a civil fraud suit, also in New York.
Golf courses are among Trump assets the Democratic attorney general of New York, Letitia James, could try to seize if Trump does not pay up.
Biden’s campaign has seized on Trump’s financial troubles, taunting him as “Broke Don”. The weekend saw a social media surge for the nickname “Don Poorleone”, a play on Trump’s mob-like approach to politics and Don Corleone, the name of the mafia boss played by Marlon Brando in the Godfather saga.
On Monday, meanwhile, EdwardIsaac Dovere, author of Battle for the Soul, a book on Biden’s victory in 2020, noted an interesting point.
So far in the 2024 campaign, Dovere wrote, Trump “has taken more time for golf tournaments than campaign events. Last night, Trump bragged about winning at golf – while still no campaign events booked.”
Most users, however, focused on mocking Trump’s golf-based braggadocio, many raising amusing parallels with another former world leader.
“According to North Korean media Kim Jong Il scored 11 holes-in-one on his very first round of golf,” said Gideon Rachman, author of The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World.
“So Trump has a way to go.”
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process that left the House leaderless.
Johnson has now passed two spending bills with Democratic support, keeping the federal government open but committing what was McCarthy’s chief sin in the eyes of the right.
Greene was not among the Republicans who moved against McCarthy but on Friday she moved against Johnson.
Rightwing Republicans expressed frustration with Johnson but many also reproved Greene. Congress left Washington for a two-week recess without Greene bringing the motion up for a vote.
Republicans have a two-vote majority, soon to dwindle to one. Democrats are seen as likely to support Johnson should Greene press ahead and try to remove him but also likely to extract concessions for doing so, most prominently including Johnson allowing a vote on new funding for Ukraine in its war with Russia.
In line with Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president seeking a second term in the White House, Johnson has refused to bring to the floor a Ukraine aid package which passed the Senate with bipartisan support.
McCarthy, who left Congress last year, told CBS: “I don’t think the Democrats will go along with [Greene’s motion]. Focus on the country. Focus on the job you’re supposed to do, and actually do it fearlessly. Just move forward.
“We watched what transpired the last time. You went three weeks without Congress being able to act. You can’t do anything if you don’t have a speaker. I think we’ve moved past that. We’ve got a lot of challenges.
“Those are the issues the country is actually looking [at], on the economy and others. If we focus on the country and what the country desires, I think the personalities can solve their own problems.”
him on everything when I brought to him my legislation, and talked to him about global Aids and needing to do something, he signed the bills that I put forth that established the Pepfar programme and the Global Fund and all of those global initiatives and helped save 25 million lives. That’s because I worked with a rightwing Republican who I voted against and disagreed with on every policy he put forward. So she taught me a lot.”
She arrived at the 1972 Democratic national convention with 152 delegates, more than Muskie or Humphrey. But McGovern had put together 1,729 delegates and claimed the nomination. He went on to lose in a landslide to President Richard Nixon. Chisholm went back to Congress and rose in leadership to become the secretary of the House Democratic caucus.
She retired in 1983, noting that “moderate and liberal” members were “running for cover from the new right” in the era of Ronald Reagan. In addition, her second husband, Arthur Hardwick, had been injured in a car accident and needed extensive care (her first marriage, to Conrad Chisholm, ended in divorce in 1977 and she did not have children).
Chisholm co-founded the National Political Congress of Black Women, which represented the concerns of African American women, and taught politics and women’s studies at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and Spelman College in Atlanta. She also had fun. Lee – who helped the filmmakers with historical research, visited the set and attended this week’s premiere in Los Angeles – recalls: “She was always dancing and she came to my mother’s 75th birthday party in Berkeley.
“She and my mother danced with the young guys until 2am, closed the place down. I have pictures of her on the dancefloor. She was a fun-loving person. She was very sensitive, though, and she cried a lot in private but you would never know it because she was a very stern, very tough, very brilliant strong Black woman.”
President Bill Clinton nominated Chisholm to be US ambassador to Jamaica but she declined due to ill health. She died aged 80 in 2005 at her home in Ormond Beach, Florida. Lee has since fought hard to preserve her legacy. She arranged for a portrait of Chisholm to be displayed at the US Capitol and is now working on the creation of a congressional gold medal in her honour.
When Harris made her own bid for the White House in 2019, she paid tribute to Chisholm in her campaign speeches, slogans and colours. But she abandoned her run before the Iowa caucuses, meaning that America is still waiting for its first female president after nearly 250 years.
Sharpton reflects: “She was very proud of her race and her gender and she in private would say that it always takes people in history to take us to the next step and, if I’ve got to take America to the next step for Blackness and Black America to the next step for misogyny, then let me be that vessel.
“The thing that was always striking to me about Mrs C is she never saw herself in contemporary terms. She saw herself as historic and that’s how she would talk about it. She would tell me, ‘Don’t pay attention to tomorrow’s tabloids; think about what history will say about you, young man.’ That’s how she thought.”
Shirley is now available on Netflix