Trump calls golf show to boast players will soon be ‘practically standing on top of each other’ again

President dials in to coverage of charity game, venting frustration at ‘watching 10-year-old golf tournaments where you know who won’

As various US states began opening up public spaces following periods of coronavirus lockdown, Donald Trump phoned in to a live golf broadcast to bemoan the suspension of sporting events – and to promise Americans attending games would soon be “practically standing on top of each other”.

In the by-turns enthusiastic, relaxed and frustrated call to NBC’s live broadcast of the TaylorMade Driving Relief charity skins game, Mr Trump complained he was “a little tired of watching 10-year-old golf tournaments where you know who won”, and that he had not played the game himself for much longer than he would like due to the pandemic.

“I do miss it. I haven’t played, really, since this problem that we have started, I haven’t been able to play golf for a while, I’ve been very busy.”

While the pandemic may have kept Mr Trump away from the links for more than two months, he spent ample time on golfing before that despite his presidential duties – and despite the fact that he had for years mocked his predecessor, Barack Obama, for supposedly spending an inordinate amount of time playing golf while in office.

The website TrumpGolfCount, which records confirmed and likely golf trips made by the current president, currently counts 117 games played by Mr Trump while in office, with other fact checkers putting him well ahead of Mr Obama.

In his phonecall to the broadcasters, Mr Trump also voiced a broader anxiety that suspending spectator sports might undermine American national character in a profound sense.

“We miss sports, we need sports in terms of the psyche – the psyche of our country – and that’s what we’re doing. It’ll start off with small crowds, if any. You saw UFC the other night, they had really just a lighted ring in the middle of an empty arena and I’m not sure that so many people missed the fans. I don’t think so in that particular case.

“But, look, we want to get it back to where it was. We want big, big stadiums loaded with people.”

Stadiums are considered conducive environments for coronavirus to spread, thanks to the sheer number of people sitting and standing in close proximity – and yelling next to each other, sending more and more respiratory droplets into the air. Some doctors have predicted that arenas are unlikely to accept large crowds before the end of 2021.

Nonetheless, Mr Trump took a gung-ho line on their reopening.

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“We really want to see it back to normal so when we have all these thousands, tens of thousands of people going to your majors and going to golf tournaments, we want them to be having that same experience,” the president said.

“We don’t want them having to wear masks and be doing what we’ve been doing for the last number of months. Because that’s not getting back to normal. We want to be back to normal where you have the big crowds, and they’re practically standing on top of each other and they’re enjoying themselves, not where they’re worried.”

And while Mr Trump also acknowledged the necessity of social distancing and measures to stop the virus’s spread, he kept in line with his recent insistence – which is not backed up by experts – that America is all but out of the woods and ready to move back to normal life.

“In the meantime, they do the social distancing, and they practice that. And they’ve been doing really well. The country is ready to start moving forward.”