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The president’s dinner with Saudi golfing leaders, hosted at his club, comes as the global economic order reels from Trump’s tariffs announcement
https://archive.ph/pFRbL https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/03/liv-golf-saudi-relationships-pull-trump-florida-markets-rage/
A day after seeking to remake the global economic order, President Donald Trump on Thursday is returning to another priority: remaking professional golf.
Trump will dine with leaders of the LIV Golf tour at his club outside Miami, his latest visit to Florida and a sporting event in a 73-day-old presidency that has already been full of both. The trip combines the president’s prized relationship with the Saudi Arabian leaders who own the tour; his regular visits to Florida, where he has spent most weekends of this presidency at his Mar-a-Lago resort; and his frequent mixing of personal business with his presidential office.
It involves a touch of statecraft, too, with LIV locked in a years-long fight with the U.S.-based PGA Tour that Trump has pledged to end. Trump hosted leaders of the two tours in the Oval Office in February, with the president seeking a truce that would reunite the world’s top golfers on the same circuit.
“President Trump has made it a priority of his administration to get this solved,” said Alan Shipnuck, author of “LIV and Let Die,” a book about the Saudi-backed tour. “My hunch is that he cares more about the LIV Golf-PGA Tour negotiations than he does about Gaza or Ukraine.”
No president has been more attached to golf than Trump, who owns courses, pals around with legends of the sport such as Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus, and prides himself on his club championships. He’s golfed with both Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which has sunk billions into LIV Golf as it has struggled to catch on with an American audience. Thursday’s dinner comes ahead of a three-day LIV tournament hosted at Trump’s Doral club and broadcast by Fox, which struck a deal in January to start airing the league’s competitions.
Trump also cares deeply about Saudi Arabia, a longtime U.S. ally that has invested in businesses operated by Trump and other family members for decades. The Middle Eastern country, ruled as an autocracy, has represented multiple firsts for the president: the first foreign visit in his first term, the first phone call to a foreign leader in his second. Trump visited Miami in February to speak at a Saudi-backed investment conference and said that he plans to head to Saudi Arabia in May in his first foreign trip this year.
“They’ve agreed to spend close to $1 trillion of money in our American companies, which to me means jobs,” Trump told reporters on Monday, explaining why he prioritizes the relationship. While Trump announced sweeping new tariffs Wednesday on imports from much of the world, roiling the financial markets, Saudi Arabia got off relatively lightly, with a 10 percent blanket duty.
Outside observers agree on the strategic value of the Saudi relationship, noting the country’s role in helping navigate the fractious Middle East and its deep-pocketed investments in the United States, and said that Trump has doubled down on building ties with Mohammed bin Salman, the nation’s crown prince and de facto ruler.
“We always wanted the Saudis to buy American weapons, and they did, and to buy Boeings, and they generally did,” said James Jeffrey, chair of the Middle East program at the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank that is federally funded and being dismantled by the administration. “Trump sees investing in the Saudis and the crown prince’s long-term vision for Saudi Arabia as great for American business.”
But Trump’s courting of Saudi leaders and investments has worried some watchdogs and lawmakers, who pointed to years of interactions and comments that they said were inappropriate by the president. After the CIA concluded that Mohammed ordered the assassination of journalist and Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, Trump publicly declared that the U.S. stood with Saudi Arabia, effectively ending efforts to privately pressure the country, according to former administration officials.
“Trump does nothing to challenge kindred-spirit Saudi kleptocrats, the first foreign hosts of this tyrant-president,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) wrote on social media in 2018. Reached on Wednesday, Raskin said he stood by the post and pointed to further examples of Trump family dealings with the Saudi government, such as Saudi investments in a fund operated by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.
The White House dismissed questions about whether Trump’s personal and professional entanglements with Saudi Arabia were appropriate.
“President Trump is the Peace President and a master dealmaker, and he has already secured $600 billion in investment from Saudi Arabia,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement, citing news reports. “Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been a key partner in U.S. efforts to both improve economic and security cooperation in the region.”
The Trump Organization, the holding company for most of Trump’s business ventures, also has said that the president would not be involved in its business decisions as he serves in the White House. It did not respond to requests for comment about this week’s LIV event.
Golf has created a new avenue for Trump to work with the Saudis, especially as his move into politics complicated his long-standing relationships within the sport. When Trump first ran for president in 2016, the PGA Tour relocated an event from the Trump-owned Doral course to Mexico City, saying the move was based on a change in sponsor. After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, the PGA of America — a separate organization that spun off the tour decades ago — canceled plans to hold its championship event at Trump’s New Jersey course. Trump subsequently struck deals to host LIV events on several of his courses, helping provide legitimacy to the upstart league and funneling money into Trump’s golf business.
While Trump has previously appeared at LIV events hosted at Doral — including playing in the tour’s pro-am event in 2022 — this week would mark his first appearance at a LIV tournament as president.
Reached for comment, LIV officials declined to discuss details about Trump’s anticipated visit to the multiday event. In the past, the league has been eager to focus attention on its golf product and roster of athletes rather than highlight its relationship with Trump or the league’s Saudi benefactors. Officials declined a Post White House reporter’s request for credentials to cover this week’s event.
“While we understand the interest, this week’s tournament is not for political reporting,” LIV spokesperson Allen Barrett wrote in an email.
The deep-pocketed Saudi Public Investment Fund, which says it has about $925 billion under management, launched LIV Golf in 2022, poaching PGA Tour golfers and immediately posing an existential threat to the world’s dominant professional golf tour. After filing dueling lawsuits in federal court, the PGA Tour struck a deal with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund in June 2023 to partner. Nearly two years later, they’ve yet to reach final terms. If a final agreement is eventually reached, the Saudis are expected to sink more than $1 billion into the PGA Tour and gain a seat on the organization’s governing board.
Until that happens, the tours continue to battle for talent, fans and relevance, with both sides agreeing the current arrangement is costly, unsustainable and bad for fans.
Enter Trump, the self-professed dealmaker extraordinaire who has a vested interest in how the dust settles. While occupants of the White House have long had a close relationship with putting greens — including practicing their swings on the small strip located outside the Oval Office — the current president has prioritized the sport and its top practitioners, awarding Woods the nation’s highest civilian honor in 2019 and urging officials in his first term to fund a health-care project backed by Nicklaus.
Eric Trump, center, putts at Trump National Doral Golf Club during the LIV Golf Miami tournament pro-am round on Thursday. (Alex Brandon/AP)
While Trump has done business with the Saudis, he’s socialized with them, too. Shortly after his election, Trump attended a UFC event in New York, sitting between Al-Rumayyan and Elon Musk.
“I think there was a sense when President Trump got reelected that it would smooth the way to a relationship, but that hasn’t materialized for reasons that we can only guess at,” said Brandel Chamblee, a Golf Channel analyst who has been critical of LIV Golf and its Saudi roots. “It looks like it is going to be some while before it happens, if it happens.”
It is not for lack of trying — or boasting. Trump predicted in November that it would take him “the better part of 15 minutes to get that deal done.”
At the PGA Tour’s request, Trump met with Monahan on Feb. 4 at the White House, with Al-Rumayyan joining at one point via phone. The golf world was hopeful that a Feb. 20 follow-up meeting in the Oval Office that included Trump, Monahan, Al-Rumayyan and golfers Woods and Adam Scott might result in an agreement. But after more than three hours of discussions, they left with no deal and several remaining hurdles, chief among them: What becomes of LIV Golf if the Saudis partner with the PGA Tour?
There had been little progress in the weeks following the White House meeting. But the Saudi Public Investment Fund reached out to the tour last week, offering a $1.5 billion investment, contingent on the continued operation of LIV Golf, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss private negotiations. The tour responded on Monday, declining any assurances on LIV’s future because, the person close to the situation said, the tour is insistent on a reconciliation of the pro golf world.
A PGA Tour spokesman declined to comment on the latest communications, which were first reported Thursday by the Guardian. The impasse casts further uncertainty on the negotiations and comes just one week before the Masters tournament, the biggest week on the golf calendar.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One en route to South Florida on Thursday, Trump expressed hope that “we’re going to get the two tours to merge.”
Though another negotiating session has not been announced, tour officials believe Trump will continue to play a role in the ongoing discussions.
“He wants to see the game reunified. We want to see the game of golf reunified,” Monahan told reporters last month. “His involvement has made the prospect of reunification very real.”
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