While Tom Brady might have made the most headlines, the least surprising sporting friends of Donald Trump's are golfers.
Golf has never exactly been shy about its conservative tendencies. The PGA Tour tends to be about as Republican as an Evangelical church in Texas - not to mention as white. Golf Digest once described being a Democrat on the tour as being "about as popular as Top-Flites", which we're sure is hilarious.
Back in 1993, the US Ryder Cup team even refused to shake hands with Bill Clinton. John Feinstein wrote in "A Good Walk Spoiled":
There wasn't a single member of the team who had voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. None of them liked the Clinton plan to tax the wealthy one bit. The politics of the team were probably best summed up by U.S. Open champion Lee Janzen, who said, 'Where I grew up you were better off telling people you were a garbage man than a Democrat.'
The new American president though has an even closer relationship with the game than his Republican predecessors.
Donald Trump is basically a golf mogul. He remains the owner (in violation of the US Constitution) of fifteen very high profile golf courses in America, Scotland and of course, Doonbeg. When he was elected, the aforementioned Golf Digest greeted the result with a mealy mouthed, sycophantic cover for their next edition.
Thank you to @GolfDigest for this incredible feature! "Golfer-in-Chief" @RealDonaldTrump https://t.co/vpdY4jNbI4 pic.twitter.com/Q5fzH4fpmH
— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) January 17, 2017
Before that, we had the bizarre situation of the Australian Prime Minister calling then President Elect Trump on his mobile after getting the number from Trump's good friend, Greg Norman.
Now it appears another supposed golfing friend of Trump's, Bernhard Langer, has found himself at the centre of the latest controversy involving the new President, and probably the most bizarre yet.
Trump's crazy racist theory du jour is that he would have won the popular vote in the US elections (which he lost by close to three million votes) because immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton illegally. Despite having no evidence whatsoever about this, Trump has been pushing the theory regularly since the election, determined to be the world's sorest winner.
Then it emerged yesterday that he did indeed have the facts. Yes, he had a conversation with non-American Bernhard Langer. And he decided to recount that conversation in his first meeting with the leaders of Congress from both parties.
According to the New York Times:
Mr. Trump said he was told a story by “the very famous golfer, Bernhard Langer,” whom he described as a friend, according to three staff members who were in the room for the meeting.
The witnesses described the story this way: Mr. Langer ... was standing in line at a polling place near his home in Florida on Election Day, the president explained, when an official informed Mr. Langer he would not be able to vote.
Ahead of and behind Mr. Langer were voters who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote, Mr. Trump said, according to the staff members — but they were nonetheless permitted to cast provisional ballots. The president threw out the names of Latin American countries that the voters might have come from.
Mr. Langer, whom he described as a supporter, left feeling frustrated...
So far, all very strange. To sum up, Trump uses the example of a German citizen not being allowed to vote, while others who "did not look as if they should be allowed to vote" were as evidence in a massive voter fraud conspiracy in an election he won.
OK...
But wait, it actually gets weirder. Because non-American Bernhard Langer didn't try to vote at all and he isn't friends with Trump. The New York Times continue:
Just one problem: Mr. Langer, who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., is a German citizen with permanent residence status in the United States who is, by law, barred from voting, according to Mr. Langer’s daughter Christina.
“He is a citizen of Germany,” she said, when reached on her father’s cellphone. “He is not a friend of President Trump’s, and I don’t know why he would talk about him.”
Hmm. The plot thickens.
The White House later said that Trump meant it was a friend of Langer's at the polling station. The identities of the shifty looking people behind him in the queue remain unchanged.
If this was completely made up, one has to question the mental stability of someone who picks out 59-year-old Bernhard Langer, who isn't even American, of all people, to give a made up example of a crackpot theory.
And so this was a story that President Donald Trump told leaders of the United States Congress at a meeting yesterday to explain his bonkers theory. This actually happened. In real life.
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