An unfortunate reality check on the strangest exchange of the night between Trump and Biden.

For the first hour and 20 minutes of Thursday night’s presidential debate, Joe Biden and Donald Trump gracefully and thoughtfully debated the day’s crucial issues. After fulfilling their democratic obligations — Trump by honestly describing his policy proposals, Biden by efficiently stringing together multiple sentences — the candidates took a well-deserved break to talk golf.

Moderator Dana Bash asked the candidates about their ages (78 for Trump, 81 for Biden). Trump, after boasting about his performance on cognitive and fitness tests, provided his response to the links.

“I just won two club championships, not even as a senior,” the former president said, as amateur golfers around the world pointed at their televisions like in this Leonardo DiCaprio meme. “Two regular club championships. To achieve this, you have to be quite intelligent and be able to hit the ball very far. He can't do it. He can't hit a ball 50 yards. He challenged me to a golf match; he can't hit a ball 50 yards.

Biden responded: I would be happy to have a driving contest. When I was vice president, my handicap was down to six. By the way, I told you before, I am happy to play golf with you if you carry your own bag. Do you think you can do it? Trump was incredulous: that is the biggest lie of all, that he had a six handicap. (In golf, a lower handicap is better. It represents, more or less, the number of strokes over par a player can expect to shoot in a given round. Anything in the single digits is good, and anything close to zero is great.)

Biden then said, “I'm an eight handicap. Eight.” He tried to continue speaking but couldn't get the words out, so it's unclear whether he was ultimately claiming to have a six or an eight handicap.

“I saw your swing,” Trump said. “I know your swing. Let's not behave like children. »

Who would win this golf match in hell? First, a little fact-check: When it came to their respective golfing abilities, both presidential candidates were absolutely, completely full of shit, even if Biden was at least factually close to the pin in describing his own handicap. Most recently, his official handicap index maintained by the United States Golf Association was 6.7, but he hasn’t recorded a score since 2018.

Trump’s history of cheating on golf and lying about his accomplishments is a long one. It’s the subject of an entire book and countless testimonies. Over the years, Trump’s playing partners have described seeing all the usual ways he cheats in golf: taking mulligans in seemingly competitive matches, moving his ball to a more favorable lie, hitting it out of a bunker and onto the grass. He does it all. Rick Reilly, the author of the book on Trump’s golf fabrications, told Vox in 2019 that Trump cheats like a mob accountant, adding, “He hits the ball so hard that the caddies call him Pel.”

These are common ways that golfers deflate their own scores, and in doing so, Trump is no different than any typical rich asshole who loves golf. But he strays from a cheap country club member because he owns many golf clubs and uses his status to award himself club championships. Each golf club organizes a championship every year to crown the club's best player. Reilly described Trump accumulating club championships by purchasing a club, setting up a match between him and the former champion, and declaring himself the winner of that match. No one other than Melania Trump would be present to serve as a witness, and even if Trump won fairly, it wouldn't be the same as winning a club championship.

Is Trump really good at golf? It's hard to say, partly because good is a moving target for all enthusiasts. Trump is an unathletic-looking 78-year-old, and most of his thousands of rounds of golf have taken place out of public view. It's easy to find video, however, of Trump hitting a brutal shaft on an extremely simple pitch right in front of the green in 2023. All the golfers hit horrible shots, but the one caught on video was of a bad standard that would do it. be quite unusual for a club's best player. Trump reports an excellent handicap of 2.5 with the USGA, which I find completely implausible. It's what golfers would call a vanity handicap, the product of a rigged score, and no one in Trump's world is trying to stop it. (He has only released two scores since his 2016 election, generally keeping his totals offline.)

However, many of the world’s best golfers have attested that Trump is a pretty good player. There is a certain partisan bias here; you probably won’t play with Trump unless you are a Trump fan, like US Open champion and big Trump fan Bryson DeChambeau, or all-time major tournament wins leader Jack Nicklaus. The Golden Bear has said that Trump is the best player of the many presidents he has played with. But Nicklaus is also a Trump sycophant who lacks the courage of his Trumpist convictions. And no human being in the history of the world has had better access to top-tier facilities and courses than Donald Trump, so it would be surprising if he wasn’t a pretty decent player.

Jill Filipovic The main reason Biden is stepping down now isn't really his age.

Biden doesn’t have the same long history of boasting about his golf skills. His handicap as vice president was a 6.7, not far off the six and eight he alternated between arguing with Trump. But the idea that Biden is any good at golf right now is, uh, questionable. He doesn’t play consistently like Trump did when he was in the White House. Biden’s swing in late 2022 looked about right for a senior, but I don’t think the president is at his peak golf game.

The president's campaign team is obsessed with finding opportunities to make him appear lively, lithe and energetic. To that end, he's had a handful of photo shoots on his bike. Unlike Trump and Barack Obama, he had little to none on the golf course. (In 2012, Biden and Obama played with John Boehner and John Kasich, who later joked that Biden had exaggerated his abilities.) When the Biden campaign released a five-minute video of Biden playing golf in Michigan , it didn't actually show him swinging a club. putting, briefly, at the end of the video. If anyone thought it was beautiful, we all would have seen more of it.

So, to answer the most important question of a beautiful evening for America: I don’t believe Biden would currently beat Trump in a golf match. Nor do I believe Trump could be even remotely competitive in an officially scored match with the best player at one of his clubs. But at least Biden and Trump have done something comparable in improving their golfing abilities for public consumption.

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