‘Keep it down – the president is talking to Xi': The golf club acting as Trump's summer White House
On a hot summer's day in August 2019 at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, members lounging by the pool were startled by an unusual announcement.
'Can you please keep the noise down because the president is talking to President Xi [Jinping] of China?' a club worker said through a megaphone. 'It was a phone call, not a visit, but it was pretty funny,' recalls one Bedminster member, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Now that Trump is in the first summer of his second presidential term, expect more surprise diplomatic moments from Bedminster – dubbed the 'Summer White House' thanks to the president's habit of spending weekends and much of August at his plush, Georgian-style, 500-acre estate, one of his three official presidential residences.
The Trump Organisation owns 15 golf clubs, but in summertime Bedminster becomes the crown jewel of the president's real estate empire, eclipsing Mar-a-Lago until September. 'It's his happy place,' the member added. 'He's always relaxed. Even at Mar-a-Lago there are wealthy 'Never-Trump' spies and enemies [conservatives backing anti-Trump Republicans]; at Bedminster, you get none of that. Everybody is known.'
'Occasionally Trump will put on a show – in his last visit to Bedminster before Covid, he landed by helicopter 10ft from the pool and everyone watched him arrive. But mostly the calmness couldn't be more different from all the drama in DC.'
Trump bought the club in 2002 from National Fairways, a golf course developer that had acquired it from another colourful, scandal-ridden businessman, John DeLorean, when it was still known as Lamington Farm. He has long had a soft spot for Bedminster, a rural town in New Jersey's Somerset Hills – the most popular fox-hunting area on the East Coast. According to the Wall Street Journal, Christopher 'Kip' Forbes, son of the late entrepreneur Malcolm Forbes, once overheard Trump arguing with a Pan Am executive at a party at the Forbes estate in Bedminster in 1987 over who had the biggest plane.
Today, his Bedminster club boasts a helipad, swimming pool, tennis courts, a spa and yoga centre and pickleball courts, alongside two 18-hole golf courses renowned for their spotless greens and manicured fairways.
'Whatever you think of how Trump runs a country, he knows how to run a club,' the member says. 'The main people running Bedminster have been there for over a decade.'
While Trump's White House has hardly been short of acrimonious personnel exits and political drama, 'at Bedminster he doesn't fire people.' (Bedminster general manager David Schutzenhofer has been at the club since 2006; director of golf Mickie Gallagher joined the same year.)
The president stays in a cottage next to the club's pool, which contains an office and a second-floor balcony and porch. Don Jr also has a cottage there, as do Eric and Lara Trump, and Ivanka Trump with her husband Jared Kushner – who married at the location in 2009. All are expected to stay there this summer.
Ivanka and Jared Kushner's cottage at Bedminster
It was to Bedminster that Donald Trump returned in July 2023 – receiving a hero's welcome after pleading not guilty at a Miami federal court to 37 charges related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents – and it was Bedminster where he stayed the night after he was shot in the right ear at a rally in Pennsylvania in July 2024.
The club also features in the president's social media posts. A video of him playing a round at Bedminster with American golfing star Bryson DeChambeau garnered 15 million views on YouTube in the run-up to last year's presidential election, while a recent fake video of him hitting persistent critic Bruce Springsteen with a golf ball has racked up 81.9 million views on X.
In reality, Mr Trump tends to play golf at Bedminster with a core group of around two dozen friends. One of them is Tom Bennison, a sports business executive. 'He uses golf in his position as president of the United States the same way he did as a businessman – as a relationship-building tool,' Bennison tells The Telegraph. 'I've played with him when it's been with friends of his, and it's like any other round of golf with three buddies who talk a lot about sports.'
'And then I've played with him when he has been with people in the political circle, congressmen or senators. He plays really fast. A round of golf with the president takes between two and a half hours and two hours 45 minutes because he's trying to get every minute out of every day that he possibly can.'
Criticism that Trump spends too much time golfing at the expense of his presidential duties is wrong, according to Republican strategist Matt Parker, co-presenter of the Golf & Politics podcast. 'One of the first weekends after the inauguration, he was playing at Trump International West Palm Beach,' Parker says. 'When he teed off, he was working on a trade deal, and by the sixth hole the trade deal was done. Between shots, he's making phone calls and sending messages.'
'Nobody has had as big an impact on the game of golf as a president than Donald Trump,' Parker adds. 'He loves the game, and with his single-digit handicap he's arguably the most talented golfer we've ever had in the White House.' Rich Levine, another golfing pal of Trump's, told the Golf & Politics podcast that Trump is a most congenial club owner: 'He'll never criticise anyone… he is so positive to every member, every employee. [He] will tell you that you played great golf, even though you played terrible that day.'
Yet beneath the surface bonhomie, Bedminster is a factional court where today's Republican politicians rise and fall. Betsy DeVos, US secretary of education in the first Trump administration, recalled how he chose the venue as the backdrop for assembling his cabinet.
'Apparently the president-elect had decided it made for better theater [sic] for his visitors to greet him on the [Bedminster] front steps,' she wrote in her memoir Hostages No More, adding: 'Trump had commandeered the clubhouse at Bedminster to have his meetings with potential cabinet secretaries […] Mitt Romney was in an interview when I arrived. James Mattis, Trump's future secretary of defense [sic], was in the green room.'
One member says that Howard Lutnick, Trump's commerce secretary and architect of his controversial tariff agenda, endeared himself to Trump by being an active presence at Bedminster. Conversely, Jeff Sessions, Trump's attorney general between 2017 and 2018, made a less favourable impression.
'When Jeff Sessions showed up at Bedminster, he was like a deer in headlights,' the member added. 'It's not the main reason he fell out of favour with Trump, but it didn't help that he looked way over his head and was never seen at Bedminster again.'
Critics of Trump say he treats Bedminster primarily as another moneymaking venture. Initiation fees are reportedly $350,000.
'If one person joins as a member, he's covered most of his property taxes!' says Pulitzer Prize-winning Trump biographer David Cay Johnston. 'Trump loses money with his British golf courses, so clubs like Bedminster become a further extension of anything he can do that will bring in money.'
Eyebrows have also been raised over the club quite literally being a cash cow, qualifying for agricultural tax breaks by harvesting hay and maintaining a small herd of goats.
Then there are the allegations from celebrities that Trump cheats at golf, frequently deploying mulligans (a rule allowing a player to retake a shot). Rocker Alice Cooper told Q Magazine in 2012: 'The worst celebrity golf cheat? I played with Donald Trump once. That's all I'm going to say.' Actor Samuel L Jackson said in 2016: 'We clearly saw him hook a ball into a lake at Trump National [Bedminster] and his caddy told him he found it!'
Sportswriter Rick Reilly recounted a tale about Trump allegedly declaring himself the winner of a Bedminster tournament in his 2019 book Commander in Cheat: 'Trump happened to walk into the Bedminster clubhouse just as a worker was putting up the name of the newly crowned senior club championship winner on a wooden plaque. Trump had been out of town and hadn't played in the tournament, but when he saw the player's name, he stopped the employee. 'Hey, I beat that guy all the time [Trump said]. Put my name up there instead […] I would've beaten him.''
However, Trump's friends refute suggestions of foul play. 'He's 100 per cent a gentleman,' says Tom Bennison. 'I've played over 125 rounds of golf with him, and I've never personally witnessed any of that.'
Yet Trump's devotion to Bedminster cannot be questioned. 'This is my real group,' Politico reported the president saying in leaked remarks to club members at a Bedminster cocktail reception in November 2016. 'These are the people that came here in the beginning, when nobody knew what this monster was gonna turn out to be.'
Ivana Trump, his late first wife, is buried in a private plot on the club's estate. According to David Cay Johnston: 'Donald Trump's assertion is that he too will be buried at Bedminster. It's really his refuge.'
One outstanding ambition for the president is for the National Golf Club Bedminster to host a PGA Championship. The club has hosted two LIV Golf tournaments – the controversial Saudi-backed breakaway championship – but plans to hold the 2022 PGA Championship there were scrapped after the January 6 storming of the US Capitol.
Members say the president's family has since attempted to mend fences with the PGA. And given the way Donald Trump has confounded his critics over the past decade, who would bet against Bedminster?
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