Commander in Cheat

by Rick Reilly

  Scavino refused my requests to interview him, but we know he’s a Catholic who once kissed the pope’s ring. He was about 40 when Trump was elected. Scavino’s wife, Jennifer, became sick with Lyme disease, and the couple says they spent so much money trying to get her well, they went bankrupt in 2015. Some people say this is why they got divorced after 18 years. “Dan was a great husband, though,” says Ian Gillule, who worked with him at Westchester. “He’s very gregarious, a big personality, a people pleaser, and very political.” Also, apparently, not a guy who will ask his billionaire boss for a loan.

  In a way, A.J. and Scavino are the same guy. A.J. is Trump’s outdoor caddy and Scavino his indoor one. They’re both mostly unknown, yet they know all the secrets. They both do the same job: They give their man the right club to take shots with. These two work for a human flamethrower and yet somehow haven’t been torched. Cabinet members, attorneys general, chiefs of staff come and go like the Wendy’s drive-thru and yet they stay employed. What’s their secret? It might be the Caddy Code: Show Up, Keep Up, Shut Up. It only takes one bad read or one bad club to get fired as a caddy, but A.J. has been Trump’s loop for years now. Scavino has survived Trump’s well-oiled guillotine and remains one of the few staffers who’s lasted since the beginning. A president who trusts nobody trusts Scavino. “The president has zero concern that Dan has any interest in anything but serving him,” the New York Times quoted a top administrator as saying. When you’re the only other person who has the president’s Twitter password, you’re trusted.

  All of which proves one thing. Jeff Sessions should’ve learned to caddy.

  15

  LITTLE BALL, BIG BALL

  I’m not a schmuck. Even if the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I won’t lose a penny.

  —DONALD J. TRUMP

  ONE DAY I WAS playing with my friend Lenny “Two Down” O’Connor. He kept hitting his irons “fat”—hitting the ground before he hit the ball. A good iron shot is just the opposite—the club traps the ball against the earth and sends it soaring.

  “Two, you idiot!” he yelled at himself. “Little ball first, THEN big ball!”

  That’s been part of the problem with Donald Trump as president. In his brain, the big ball keeps getting in the way of the little ball and vice versa.

  So many of the problems, controversies, and conflicts Trump has gotten into as president started with golf. Conversely, his golf has twisted how he makes decisions about this great, big, troubled blue ball he’s supposed to be running.

  Take, for instance, Puerto Rico.

  Why did Trump seem to turn his back on our own people during the devastating 2017 hurricane that would leave almost 3,000 dead and the island without water and power for eight months?

  Why? Golf might be why.

  It started in 2008, when the Trump Organization agreed to operate a course called Coco Beach Golf & Country Club, about 30 minutes from San Juan. It was in trouble and needed a big name to get it some publicity. So, for a fat fee and part of the deal, Trump agreed to operate the course and let them call it Trump International Golf Club Puerto Rico. In his pitch to get the deal, Trump guaranteed the course would start turning a profit. Bigly. Puerto Ricans were thrilled.

  But Trump only sunk it deeper. Before Trump, the course was losing about $5.4 million a year. With Trump—$6.3 million. Some of that was the $600,000 Trump took out for his fee over those years. Within three years, the Coco Beach company defaulted on $26 million in government bonds and had to get $33 million more in government financing, which they also couldn’t repay. Trump finally declared bankruptcy on his end of the project in 2015, and the Coco group went belly up, too, leaving the Puerto Ricans with a $33 million hole.

  Fast forward two years to the worst hurricane to hit Puerto Rico in 85 years. It was a catastrophe. Yet, as American citizens were dying for water, medicine, and power in Puerto Rico, their president seemed to not give a damn. He made jokes. “See, there’s this big thing called the Atlantic Ocean,” he said. He mused about how to pronounce the name “Puerto Rico.” Then he decided they only had themselves to blame. He tweeted:

  Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble.

  That was too much for Lainie Green, a Puerto Rican marketing executive who threw an epic tweetstorm back at him:

  Massive debt you and your sons helped when you bankrupted your golf course & never paid back the $33 mil bond you left Puerto Ricans with.

  You remember because you filed for the bankruptcy a month after you started running for president in 2015.

  So how much are you going to give back of that $600,000 paycheck you got for sticking Puerto Rico with a $33 million debt?

  “He came down here and was so obnoxious,” says Green. “He said, ‘We’re gonna pour $600 million into the course.’ That was bullsh*t. They didn’t put any of their own money into it. He and his sons were here for seven years and every year they lost more and more money. The [Coco] owners went to the [Puerto Rican] tourism bureau and asked for a $33 million bond. The government said no.… But Trump’s sons kept saying, ‘No, Donald Trump will be here all the time! He knows what he’s doing! Trust us!’ So they loaned the money. By 2015, they had to declare bankruptcy and the Trumps left us holding the bag.”

  When Trump visited the devastated island in late September, he seemed cavalier about it all, almost flip, visiting only the mostly untouched ritzy part of the island, where he shot rolls of paper towels like 3-pointers at a room full of dismayed Puerto Ricans and then left.

  “That was disgusting,” Green remembers. (She was crying by now as she spoke.) “These are human beings. American citizens! The people he’s responsible for! He had absolutely no empathy for our people. There’s something psychotic and wrong about that. He had every opportunity to say, ‘Hey, I love Puerto Rico. I don’t want to fail them.’ Instead he took swipes at my people and threw paper towels to his f*cking rich friends. I’d love to see Trump Tower without power for eight hours, much less eight months.”

  If she could get face-to-face with Trump, what would she say?

  “I’d say, ‘Would you ever leave your grandkids alone in the dark with no power, no water, and nothing to help them? Because that’s what you did to these people.’… He let them die.”

  Take, for instance, immigration.

  When Trump first tried banning U.S. travel to people from seven different Muslim countries—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—some Americans wondered, “Why those seven? Why not the UAE or Saudi Arabia? After all, the UAE helped fund the Taliban and may have been a backer of 9/11. Saudi Arabia has been the breeding ground for hundreds of terrorists, not to mention Osama Bin Laden.”

  Why? Golf might be why.

  Even now, Trump is up to his clavicles in golf deals with the UAE, specifically controversial UAE tycoon Hussain Sajwani, sometimes called “The Donald of Dubai.” Sajwani, a devout Muslim, even came to Trump’s post-election party at Mar-a-Lago, earning a shout out from the man of the hour. “Hussain and the whole family, the most beautiful people, are here from Dubai tonight!” Sajwani owns two courses with Trump’s name—Trump International Golf Club Dubai and Trump World Golf Club Dubai. The latter was designed by no less than Tiger Woods. Trump wasn’t going to screw that up with a travel ban. What if Tiger needs to meet with his concrete guy?

  Then there’s China. Trump’s relationship with China is fickle, but in June of 2018, Trump threw a lifeline to shady Chinese telecom giant ZTE. It got both aisles of Congress leaping out of their chairs in protest. “China… uses these telecom companies to spy & steal from us,” Republican senator Marco Rubio pointed out. So why did Trump grease the skids for a company that America wants to see burn?

  Why? Golf might be why.

  At Trump Dubai, Sajwani awarded a $32 million infrastructure construction contract to the mostly state-owned China State Construction Engineering Corporation t
o build a road that would lead to the golf course. In other words, Trump was suddenly in bed with China. So when China’s Xi Jinping personally asked Trump for help with ZTE, Trump might’ve thought, “Would helping ZTE make working with Xi really easy? Yes. Yes, it would.” So he did it, against the advice of nearly everybody.

  And why, you ask, wasn’t Indonesia on the travel-ban list, since there are more Muslims in Indonesia than any country in the world (227 million) and, in just the first three weeks of May 2018, 49 people died in multiple ISIS attacks there committed by Indonesian Muslims?

  Why? Golf might be why.

  Trump has two courses about to open in Indonesia, one in Bali, to be redesigned by Phil Mickelson, and the other in Jakarta, by four-time major winner Ernie Els. Remember when Trump’s lawyers announced they’d be suspending all unfinished projects now that he was president? Not so much. He’s moved forward in Indonesia. Should an American president be in business at all in a country like Indonesia, whose citizens committed almost twice as many terrorist acts as Iran in 2016? Depends. Will this country put up a golf course with his name on it?

  When Trump made “Buy American, Hire American” one of his campaign slogans, he was at the same time issuing an executive order that greatly increased the amount of foreign H-2B temporary visa workers coming to this country. But why would he do that when an H-2B could come here and join a terrorist cell as easily as somebody who hopped a fence or faked a passport?

  Why? Golf might be why.

  Trump needs H-2B visa workers to make his golf courses and hotels work. He knows this country doesn’t have an unemployment problem. It has an employment problem. It can’t find enough people to do jobs most Americans won’t do—mowing fairways, cleaning hotel rooms, washing gold-rimmed soup bowls. So nobody in golf was surprised that three days after the Trump administration raised the H-2B visa cap from 66,000 per year to 81,000, the Trump Organization applied for and got an additional 76 of them to use at its properties.

  You ask, “Does Trump employ illegal immigrants at his golf courses?”

  I answer, “Did Liz Taylor own a wedding dress?”

  In December of 2018, Trump Bedminster got caught employing an illegal maid, to almost nobody’s surprise. “They had all kinds of illegal immigrants working at Doral,” says Joe Santilli, a former member there. “I know because I’d talk to them. I speak Spanish. They would be hired through a contractor so Trump wasn’t on the line if they got caught. But they had tons of illegals working on crews there.”

  There’s almost no conceivable way not to. I don’t know many golf clubs that don’t use them. The day I played with Trump at Westchester, he stopped three laborers who were finishing up a cart path and gave them each $100 bills for their good work. Then he got back in the cart and said, “Now they’re the Donald Trumps of Chile!”

  Take, for instance, Cuba.

  When Trump got into office, he immediately started reversing Obama orders that would finally allow Americans to travel to Cuba, calling it a “bad deal” for Americans. In one iteration of the travel ban, Cuba was even named to his hit list. Some Americans thought, “Why? Why come down against Cuba now after all the progress the two countries have made?”

  Why? Golf might be why.

  In 1998, according to Newsweek, Trump secretly looked into building a hotel and golf course in Cuba. He paid an American consulting firm called Seven Arrows Investment to travel to Cuba to explore his options there, in direct violation of the embargo on Americans doing business in Cuba. Seven Arrows charged Trump $68,000 for the trip but, to disguise its illegality, made it look like a charity trip.

  It went deeper. According to Bloomberg, more than a few Trump Organization people went down to Cuba to explore golf course and hotel possibilities more recently, too. When Bloomberg found out, it asked Eric Trump about it. He emailed back: “While we are not sure whether Cuba represents an opportunity for us, it is important for us to understand the dynamics of the markets that our competitors are exploring.”

  Wait, is that a denial?

  There’s paperwork for all this—lying to the IRS, repeatedly violating the embargo—but the statute of limitations has passed, so why let a bunch of snoopy American reporters in there to dig up new stuff? Trump may have thought, “Let’s just keep everybody out of Cuba altogether.”

  Take, for instance, the wall.

  Not that wall—the wall he wants to build in Ireland to keep the Atlantic Ocean off his Irish golf course, Doonbeg.

  “The sea water is clearly rising,” Trump’s attorneys argued in a planning application in Doonbeg, a little burg on the southwest coast of Ireland. “Mr. Trump’s property stands to be forever damaged without the wall.” It said it right there in the application. The Trump Organization was asking for permission to build a giant wall because the effects of “climate change” were wrecking Trump’s course.

  Imagine that. Trump, who has said climate change is “a hoax,” “fictional,” and “a canard,” was asking for the right to protect himself against rising sea water. The man who pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate change believes climate change is damaging his property.

  “In our view, it could reasonably be expected that the rate of sea level rise might become twice of that presently occurring,” the application said. Trump actually wanted two “flood defense walls,” as his lawyers called them. Combined, they’d run about 3,000 feet along the coast, protecting three golf holes.

  The Council gave permission. Irish environmentalists flipped out. They agreed the sea was rising, but said a wall could open a Pandora’s box of ecological problems. For one thing, it would push all the water onto nearby farms, ruining their crops. The beach and dunes could be destroyed. Surfer groups opposed it. As of the start of 2019, the application was still under appeal.

  A bit of advice to the world’s leaders: If you want to get in good with Trump, take golf lessons.

  Japan’s prime minister Shinzoˉ Abe gets golf. He gave Trump a $3,755 gold-plated driver. They play together often. Chinese president Xi Jinping, though, hates golf. He’s shut down 111 golf courses in China already and forbids any of the 88 million members of his Communist Party to play it. He thinks golf is a waste of water and land. Whatever good Trump did for their relationship with ZTE, Xi’s disgust for golf hurts it. Would Trump start a trade war with China out of the blue, just to get even?

  If you run a country but don’t play golf, you’re pretty much dead to Trump. German chancellor Angela Merkel always seems to be on the outside, her nose pressed to the grill room window, looking in at Trump and the day’s foursome. One German official publicly suggested she should learn to play golf.

  Playing golf hasn’t hurt members of Trump’s golf clubs any. Trump has put at least five of his members into senior roles in his administration, including Newt Gingrich’s wife, Callista, America’s new ambassador to the Vatican, and Adolfo Marzol—member at Trump Washington—who is now the senior adviser at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

  Andrew Giuliani, son of Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, was named in March to a White House post as public liaison assistant. He’s a scratch golfer and member at Trump Westchester. Robin Bernstein might seem an odd choice to be the ambassador to the Dominican Republic, seeing as she only speaks “basic Spanish,” until you realize she was a campaign donor, sells insurance to Trump, and is a founding member at Mar-a-Lago. Whenever she’s in the D.R., she can check in on Trump’s proposed golf courses as Cap Cana, another unfinished project he was supposedly going to suspend and didn’t.

  Doesn’t every president appoint their friends to sweet jobs? Yes, but unlike any president before him, Trump never divested his businesses before becoming president. Every single decision he makes as POTUS can affect his own wallet. When you can get up to $350,000 from people for joining your club, it helps to make membership attractive.

  Hey, how would you like to be ambassador to Sweden? Just sign here!

  The lines get blur
red. In 2018, Trump visited the factory of avid golfer Robert Mehmel, a man who sells millions of dollars’ worth of radars and electronics to the U.S. military and who also happens to be a member of Trump’s Bedminster golf club.

  CSPAN captured Kevin Burke, a lobbyist for airports, mentioning to Trump at a White House meeting, “I’m a member of your club, by the way.”

  “Very good, very good,” Trump replied.

  The word is out. If you’re a lobbyist, a special-interest dealer, a foreign intermediary who needs Trump’s ear, pony up the initiation fee and join one of his clubs. The access is fantastic. Can’t afford that? Have a wedding there. As advertised for a time on a Trump Bedminster brochure, if you hold your wedding there, Trump might even show up, say hello, and pose for pictures, at no additional charge. (“We ask you and your guests to be respectful of his time & privacy,” the brochure asked.) Lots of people have posted videos of him doing exactly that. On July 2, 2018, Trump surprised a wedding, posed for pictures, and even kissed the bride. Then he walked off to applause and a cry of “We love you!”

  Somewhere, a tiny tear trickled down Angela Merkel’s cheek.

  For most people, it’s the goats.

  When I try to explain how Trump constantly hot-foots his golf cart down the line between illegal and immoral, I always bring up the goats.

  “Did you know,” I say, “that on Trump’s Bedminster course there’s a small herd of eight goats?”

  Goats?

  “Goats,” I say. “He keeps eight goats on his golf course in order to get a farmland tax break, saving him about $80,000 in taxes per year. He also has a tiny hay-making enterprise at Trump Colts Neck in New York, just enough to get another farmland write-off.”