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News.com.au
7 minutes ago
- News.com.au
Viral videos of Donald Trump cheating at golf are hilarious
Think of Donald Trump's second presidency, so far, as a par 5 hole at one of his more beloved golf courses. Heck, let's get specific and say Turnberry. He was there just this week, and Scotland's weather offers the appropriate level of bluster. Shot one (the early weeks): a clean drive, albeit one shaped with a fade far, far, faaaaaaaaaaaar to the right. Mr Trump strides confidently, even cockily, down the fairway. He is, by all accounts, pretty damn good off the tee. Shot two (the vacillating tariff policies): looking to lay up near the green, Mr Trump sends his first attempt skewing off into the trees. He takes a mulligan. Then another. Then another. Until finally, we get a ball on the fringe of the fairway, and the markets calm down. Shot three (immigration enforcement): a relatively easy shot, here. Most Americans support the deportation of criminals. But ....... oh no. He's overhit the darned thing, depriving people of their basic rights and chucking US citizens into detention. It sails over the green and yes, into a bunker. Nobody wants that. Such a pity. Shot four (the Big, Beautiful Bill): though it appears to defy physics, Mr Trump somehow manages to hit the ball backwards out of the bunker, ending up further away from the green than before. Tortured metaphor for his ballooning of America's national debt, there. Shot five (the Epstein files): a palpably frustrated Mr Trump hacks at the ball and sends it ricocheting into his own caddy's face, infuriating the very person whose tireless support got him to this position in the first place. At this point Mr Trump picks up his ball, hops on his golf cart and speeds to the next hole, saying, 'Wow! An eagle!' And his entourage, ever obedient, applauds. 'Great shot, sir!' Bit of a caricature, maybe, of Mr Trump's politics. But not of his golfing habits. The videos that went viral this week from his trip to Scotland, which showed him cheating quite blatantly, represent a single grain in the sand of a truly cavernous bunker. The man is a chronic, prodigious, shameless cheater, as we shall explore below. Mr Trump's golfing occupies a peculiar space in what we might call, with rolling eyes, the 'discourse'. Obviously, it doesn't matter. You won't find a single voter who cares whether the guy shot a 71 or a 95 on Saturday. And yet it's illustrative. His serial cheating on the links speaks to something deeply embedded in his character, something that does matter. Here's the fundamental question. Donald Trump is, genuinely, a good golfer. Everyone who knows the sport, and has either played with him or caddied for him, acknowledges that. Look at this drive! He has a great handicap, even by the standards of someone who plays so often. Most experts who've observed him put it at 10, or maybe a touch lower. That's impressive! And at the age of 79, no less. (Mr Trump himself insists his handicap is, preposterously, below 3, which is equivalent to claiming Madagascar is in the Atlantic.) Why then, does he cheat so brazenly, and so relentlessly? He doesn't need to! Therein lies the great mystery. 'And how can he be so shameless as to cheat right in front of people?' sportswriter Rick Reilly wondered in his 2019 book on the matter, Commander in Cheat, a tome long on my to-read list, which I finally found an excuse to inhale after this week's videos. 'They call him on it, but he just shrugs and cheats some more. It's ruined his reputation in the golf world. Ninety per cent of the people I interviewed – on and off the record – say he openly cheats. A lot of them said they stopped playing with him because of it. 'So why? Why cheat? Why lie? Why exaggerate his handicap, his scores, his club championships?' (Mr Trump claims to have won almost 20 golf championships, all but two of which are so baseless as to be deemed laughable by Mr Reilly. And those other two are dubious as well. More than once, the President has demanded to be named the winner of a tournament even though he was in a different state when it was held.) The book includes a frequently hilarious collection of anecdotes from people who have witnessed Mr Trump's behaviour. You're struck by how brazen it all is. Everybody knows he's doing it. Everybody. No one is even remotely fooled. It's a decades-long running joke. The footage from Scotland shows a couple of examples. In one clip, a caddy surreptitiously drops a ball for Mr Trump just off the fairway – his actual shot having landed, presumably, in much dicier territory. Mr Trump drives up in his cart, which was trailing close behind, and approaches it as though nothing unusual has happened. Just a routine bit of skulduggery. In a second clip, Mr Trump drives up to a spot where there is no ball at all. He pretends to wipe away some stray grass, simultaneously drops a ball there, and then plays it, as though it had been sitting there the whole time. According to the stories Mr Reilly gathered, this is typical Trump conduct. A quote from women's golf professional Suzann Pettersen, who actually gets along reasonably well with Mr Trump: 'No matter how far into the woods he hits the ball, it's in the middle of the fairway when we get there.' A man named Bill Rayburn, who caddied for Mr Trump once at 'a celebrity' event: 'Even with a gallery, marshals and me standing there, he openly cheated at least 10 times. I stopped counting around the 15th hole.' NBA coach Doc Rivers, boxer Oscar De La Hoya and musician Alice Cooper are also among those who expressed their incredulity at Mr Trump's cheating. I could cite a dozen more from the book at least. In casual golf there's something called a 'gimme'. It's when your opponent acknowledges you will almost certainly make a putt, and just gives you the shot without making you play it. That's something your partner gives to you. Mr Trump calls gimmes for himself, not just for short putts, but sometimes for mid-range or long putts too. He's been known to grant himself gimmes for chip-ins, meaning the ball isn't even on the green. 'Did you just take a gimme chip-in?' asked one witness to this nonsense, Mr Reilly himself, during a round with Mr Trump. 'By the time I got my jaw refastened, he was driving off in the cart,' he recounts. Part of a chapter in the book is devoted to classifying Mr Trump's various cheeky tactics. Mr Reilly dubs one 'the invisible dunk'. 'This one time, I was in the fairway and he was right of the green, but a little bit down the hill,' one 'frequent guest in Trump's' playing groups told the writer. 'He didn't think anybody was watching, but I was. I saw him make a chipping motion from the side of the hill, but no ball came up. 'Then he walked up the hill, stuck his hand into the hole and pulled a ball out. It must have been a ball he had in his hand the whole time. Then he looks up and yells, 'I chipped it in!' I mean, who does that?' Another tale, here, from probably Mr Trump's favourite course, his own one in New Jersey. 'People like to tell about the time Trump hit one in the pond. Everybody saw it splash a good 30 feet from shore,' says Mr Reilly. 'When the group got up to the pond, the caddy says, 'Boss, your ball is right here.' It was sitting safely on the grass. 'Someone in the group yelled at the caddy: 'What did you do with your mask and flippers?'' Buy the book if you want more of these anecdotes. They are plentiful. The impression you have is of a man who will do anything possible, no matter how dodgy or brazen, to help him shoot a better score. And of a man who has precisely zero shame. I would like to think that most of us, having shanked a ball in front of multiple witnesses, would laugh about it and play on. Not this guy. He insists the shot was perfect, whatever your lying eyes tell you, and then shoots his next from the fairway, and then brags about making a birdie. But wait! That is not the end of his chicanery. Mr Trump is also notorious for fudging his scores, and for claiming titles he could not possibly have won. Mr Reilly recounts a day on which Mr Trump entered the clubhouse at a respected course, claiming to have shot a very impressive 68. He spent some time hobnobbing and boasting about the score, then left. The club's head pro summoned the caddies from Mr Trump's group into his office. 'Mr Trump said he shot a 68 here today. Is that true?' the pro asked. The caddies' responses were, in turn, 'no way' and 'no f***ing way'. At best, they said, Mr Trump had shot a 79. Probably worse, but the sheer volume of cheating made it hard to tell. 'There was so much trickery and fraud, it was impossible to know what he'd really shot,' writes Mr Reilly. 'The 68, they said, came with tosses, kicks, and golf balls getting free rides back to the short grass. It came with do-overs, takeovers, and floating mulligans. It came with very little sound of plastic balls actually going into little plastic cups.' The book starts with a relevant, if clichéd, quote from the English author P.G. Wodehouse (whose full, far more amusing name was Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse): 'To find a man's true character, play golf with him.' It sounds glib, even stupid, but ... yeah, actually. Sport is psychological. That is why it's more compelling than most scripted dramas. When a man is petty enough to rig a casual game of golf in his favour, and to do it as a matter of habit, year after year, you do start to consider how he approaches other aspects of life. The law, for example. The treatment of his tax affairs. The treatment of other human beings, outside the clubhouse. 'Trump doesn't just cheat at golf. He cheats like a three-card Monte dealer,' says Mr Reilly. 'He throws it, boots it, and moves it. He lies about his lies. He fudges and foozles and fluffs. At Winged Foot (a golf course where Trump is a member), the caddies got so used to seeing him kick his ball back onto the fairway they came up with a nickname for him: 'Pele'.' One more story, because I'm sorry, but they're really very amusing. One of Trump's playing partners, NFL commentator Mike Tirico was competing with him on a par 5, and hit 'the 3-wood of his life'. 'The thing had the flag covered from the start. It crested the hill perfectly, and was going to be tight to the pin,' says Mr Reilly. 'Shocked at his sudden skill, Tirico high-fived his caddie and strode towards the green, his shoes barely touching the grass. 'But somehow, when they got there, the ball wasn't near the pin. It wasn't even on the green. It was 50 feet left of the pin, in the bunker. Unless it hit a drone and ricocheted sideways, there was no physical way it could have ended up there.' Mr Trump's reaction to this was to tell Mr Tirico 'lousy break'. Later, the future president's caddy came up to the commentator. 'You know that shot you hit on the par 5? It was about ten feet from the hole. Trump threw it into the bunker. I watched him do it,' the caddy said. Funny and pathetic, in equal measure. And another data point in our continuing, ever-grimmer assessment of Donald Trump's character.
News.com.au
14 minutes ago
- News.com.au
Australia on track with only four of 19 Closing The Gap targets
The country is severely behind in bringing outcomes for Indigenous Australians in line with their non-Indigenous counterparts, with only four of 19 Closing The Gap targets on track, a new report shows. The Productivity Commission, which monitors progress on the targets, revealed on Thursday that Australia was on track in boosting preschool enrolments, employment and two land rights goals. But the rest were either improving too slowly or worsening. Among those getting worse was adult imprisonment, with 2304 out of every 100,000 adults behind bars Indigenous. Other areas worsening were children in out-of-home care (50 out of every 1000 children), suicide rates (31 out of every 100,000 people) and children's educational development, with only 33.9 per cent on track. Productivity Commission chief Selwyn Button said in a statement the report 'shows that outcomes can't easily be reduced to a number'. 'The outcomes are all connected, each reflecting aspects of a broader system and the experiences of the people who have shared their stories,' Mr Button said 'What the outcomes in the agreement reflect most of all is the limited progress of governments in collectively acting on the priority reforms: sharing decision making and data with communities; strengthening the Aboriginal community controlled sector and changing the way governments operate.' He went on to say a recent 'independent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led review of the agreement and the PC's 2024 review both show that the transformational change that governments committed to is falling well short of what has been promised'. Asked about the report's findings on breakfast news, Treasurer Jim Chalmers echoed Mr Button, saying governments have not done enough. 'We need to do much better,' Mr Chalmers told the ABC. 'I think every member of the government, I think many Australians, would acknowledge that we need to do better and the reason why these reports are so important is because they make sure that we keep governments and the community more broadly up to the mark.' He praised Indigenous Australians Minister Malarndirri McCarthy for 'working in her characteristically diligent way with all of the stakeholders, all of the communities to try to turn these numbers around'.
ABC News
32 minutes ago
- ABC News
Little has changed since disability royal commission exposed deep institutional failings
"Devastated." "An insult." "A failure of leadership." That's what the disability community said a year ago when the federal government released its initial response to the $600 million Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability. It came after four and a half years of shocking evidence that revealed to the wider public how people with disability had been sexually assaulted, forcibly restrained and sterilised, and ripped off by people and institutions meant to help them. People with disability fought for years to get a royal commission and agreed to relive their biggest traumas in the hope it would finally bring about change. But the overwhelming feeling last July, after the initial response to the commission's 222 recommendations, was that measures to address them were being kicked down the road. Twelve months on, advocates are concerned the inquiry has vanished from public view, with many wondering where the progress is at from this once-in-a-generation opportunity for change. "Many of the issues identified remain unresolved, without clarity on what action is being taken and when," Women with Disabilities Australia CEO Sophie Cusworth said. Simply put, the royal commission has led to very little real-world change so far. Per the Commonwealth's last progress update — released just days before Christmas last year — one of the biggest shifts has been the amendment of a contentious migration law. The rest of the update mostly revolves around administrative work — things like reviews of various strategies and plans, establishing employment targets for the public sector and creating a "disability-inclusive" definition of family violence. Greens senator Jordon Steele-John — who was instrumental in getting the inquiry set up in 2019 — said governments "not only kicked the can down the road" last year — they "crushed it". Those governments — which missed the original response deadline by four months — agreed to start biannual progress reporting against all 222 recommendations from June 2025. However, that's yet to start, with the government confirming it's been delayed until at least mid-August. Commitments to bigger ticket recommendations — such as the phasing out of segregated education, housing and employment; creating a disability rights act; and changes to guardianship laws across the country — have been largely absent from progress reports, as well as from federal and state budgets. When they have appeared in budgets, they've sometimes been in opposition to the commissioners' recommendations — for example, Queensland's recently announced plan to open half a dozen new special schools. Many items from the initial response were listed as needing "further consideration", but exactly how far along that consideration has come remains unclear. The federal government noted last year that responding to the royal commission wouldn't be easy, saying recommendations straddled several jurisdictions and the six commissioners themselves didn't agree on everything. In a statement, a federal government spokesperson said it was taking the royal commission's recommendations "very seriously". They said the government remained committed to working with the disability community and state and territory ministers to "implement meaningful change". Senator Steele-John said that needed to be a matter of urgency. "We need the government to take the opportunity of this new parliament to actually look at the recommendations with fresh eyes and to decide to join the disability community in the work," he said. Governments have had the royal commission's recommendations since September 2023 but the systemic change it has demanded is clearly a long way off. That change was never going to happen overnight. Genuine co-design with people with disability takes time, too. Ms Cusworth understands that but she says the lives and safety of people with disability can't wait. Sally Robinson, a professor of disability and community inclusion at Flinders University, has some sympathy for governments because of how complex the situation is. "But I really do wish they would be more transparent so that we all had an idea about where that work was up to and why it's taking time," she said. People with disability are used to feeling sidelined, but the royal commission was supposed to be different. Two years ago, my colleague Nas Campanella wrote that, without change, the trauma of the inquiry would have been for nothing. And as we sit here in the second half of 2025, many of those who poured their hearts into this huge opportunity for reform fear that's how things are shaping up.
