I Have an Unfortunate Reality Check About the Weirdest Exchange of the Debate
Donald Trump and Joe Biden in side-by-side photos of them on a golf course.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images and Rob Carr/Getty Images.
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 critical issues.

Having fulfilled their democratic obligations—Trump by honestly describing his policy proposals, Biden by effectively stringing together several sentences at once—the candidates took a deserved respite to talk about golf.

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

“I just won two club championships—not even senior,” the former president said, as recreational golfers all over the world pointed at their TVs like that Leonardo DiCaprio meme. “Two regular club championships. To do that, you have to be quite smart, and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way. He doesn’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 replied: “I’d be happy to have a driving contest. I got my handicap when I was vice president down to a six. By the way, I told you before, I’m happy to play golf with you if you carry your own bag. Think you can do it?” Trump was incredulous: “That’s the biggest lie—that he was a six handicap—of all.” (In golf, a lower handicap is better. It represents, more or less, how many strokes over par a player can be expected to shoot in a given round. Anything in the single digits is good, and anything close to zero is great.)

Biden then said, “I was an eight handicap. Eight.” He tried to keep talking but could not get the words out, so it’s not clear if he was ultimately claiming to be a six or an eight handicap.

“I’ve seen your swing,” Trump said. “I know your swing. Let’s not act like children.”

Who would win this golf match in hell? First, a little fact check: As it concerns their respective golf abilities, both candidates for president were absolutely, utterly full of shit, though Biden was at least factually close to the pin in describing his own handicap. Most recently, his official handicap index maintained with the United States Golf Association was a 6.7, but he has not listed a score since 2018.

Trump’s history of cheating in golf and lying about his exploits is old hat. It is the subject of an entire book and countless testimonials. Over the years, Trump’s playing partners have described seeing all the usual manners of golf cheating: taking mulligans in ostensibly competitive matches, moving his ball to a more favorable lie, throwing it out of a bunker and onto the grass. He does it all. Rick Reilly, the author of the book about Trump’s golf fabrications, told Vox in 2019 that Trump “cheats like a mafia accountant,” adding: “He kicks the ball so much that caddies call him Pelé.”

These are common ways in which golfers deflate their own scores, and in doing them, Trump isn’t different than any typical rich asshole who loves golf. But he diverges from a bargain-basement country club member because he owns numerous golf clubs and uses his status to attribute club championships to himself. Every golf club puts on a championship every year to crown the best player at the club. Reilly described Trump racking up club championships by buying a club, setting up a match between himself and the prior champion, and declaring himself the winner of that match. Nobody other than Melania Trump would be on hand to serve as a witness, and even if Trump won fair and square, it wouldn’t be the same as winning a “club championship.”

Is Trump actually good at golf? It’s hard to say, in part because “good” is a moving target for all amateurs. Trump is an unathletic-looking 78-year-old, and most of his thousands of golf rounds have occurred out of public view. It’s easy to find a video, though, of Trump hitting a brutal shank on an extremely straightforward pitch shot from right in front of the green in 2023. All golfers hit horrible shots, but the one caught on video was a level of bad that would be quite unusual for the best player at a club. Trump reports an excellent 2.5 handicap with the USGA, which I find completely implausible. It is what golfers would call a “vanity handicap,” the product of fudged scorekeeping and nobody in Trump’s world trying to stop him. (He has only posted two scores since his 2016 election, usually keeping his totals off the internet.)

However, many of the best golfers in the world have attested that Trump is a pretty good player. There’s some partisan bias at play there; you probably don’t play with Trump unless you’re a fan of Trump, like U.S. Open champion and big-time Trump guy Bryson DeChambeau, or all-time majors leader Jack Nicklaus. The Golden Bear has said Trump is the best player of the several presidents with whom he’s teed it up. But Nicklaus is also a Trump sycophant who lacks the courage of his Trumpist convictions. And no human in the history of the world has had better access to high-level facilities and instruction than Donald Trump, so his not being a pretty decent player would be astonishing.

Biden does not have the same long history of bragging about how good he is at golf. His handicap when he was vice president was 6.7, so not far off the “six” and “eight” that he alternately claimed as he argued with Trump. But the idea that Biden is currently any good at golf is, uh, questionable. He does not play regularly as Trump did in his White House days. Biden’s swing as of late 2022 looked just fine for a senior, but I don’t think the president is in his golfing heyday.

The president’s campaign staff are obsessed with finding opportunities to make him look spry, limber, and energetic. To that end, he’s had a handful of photo ops riding his bike. Unlike both Trump and Barack Obama, he’s had few or none on the golf course. (In 2012, Biden and Obama played with John Boehner and John Kasich, who later joked that Biden exaggerated his ability.) When Biden’s campaign unveiled a five-minute video of Biden “playing golf” in Michigan, it did not actually show him swinging a club—only putting, briefly, at the end of the video. If anyone thought it looked good, we’d have all seen more.

So to answer the most important question of a fine night for America: I do not believe that Biden would currently beat Trump in a golf match. I also do not believe that Trump could be even remotely competitive in an officially scored match with the best player at any of his clubs. But at least both Biden and Trump have done something relatable in hamming up their golf abilities for public consumption.

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