President-elect Donald Trump has much bigger concerns on his agenda right now than the fate of professional golf, but the schism at the heart of the men’s game could be resolved during — and potentially even because of — a new Trump administration.
On two successive days over the weekend, Trump was spotted in association with the two principal figures in the PGA Tour-LIV Golf saga. Friday, the Washington Post reported that Trump played golf with PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Saturday evening at a UFC event, Trump sat next to Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the financial backer of LIV Golf.
The PGA Tour and LIV Golf have run on separate tracks since 2022, when LIV Golf poached a significant portion of the Tour’s notable players and began operating as its own tour. The two entities announced a cessation of legal hostilities in June 2023, but have not yet been able to craft any kind of workable operating agreement going forward. Their self-imposed deadline of Dec. 31, 2023, is now almost a year in the past.
Trump’s affinity for golf stretches back decades. His portfolio of courses includes some of the most notable in the United States and Europe, though the courses haven’t hosted a PGA Tour event since the days of the first Trump administration. The PGA of America pulled the 2022 PGA Championship from a Trump course following the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Trump courses have hosted multiple LIV Golf events over the past three years.
With characteristic bravado, Trump has declared that he could get the two parties to work out a deal. “I could certainly help it,” he told Jim Gray and Bill Belichick on the “Let’s Go” podcast. “I would say it would take me the better part of 15 minutes to get that deal done.”
Trump had previously endorsed the cause of LIV Golf players, saying in 2022 that they should break from the “disloyal” Tour and “take the money.”
“All of those golfers that remain ‘Loyal’ to the very disloyal PGA, in all of its different forms, will pay a big price when the inevitable MERGER with LIV comes, and you get nothing but a big ‘Thank You’ from PGA officials who are making millions of dollars a year,” Trump wrote in July 2022 on his Truth Social network. “If you don’t take the money now, you will get nothing after the merger takes place and only say how smart the original signees were.”
Immediately after Trump won the 2024 election, Rory McIlroy — while conceding that there are much more important matters than golf — suggested that maybe Trump could move the negotiations along. “He’s got Elon Musk, who I think is the smartest man in the world, beside him. We might be able to do something if we can get Musk involved, too,” McIlroy said. “But obviously Trump has a great relationship with Saudi Arabia. He’s got a great relationship with golf. He’s a lover of golf. So, maybe. Who knows?”
It’s unclear how much influence Trump would be able to exert on the negotiations, but a key component of any PGA Tour/LIV alignment is whether it would pass Department of Justice scrutiny. On a high-level scale, Trump’s Justice Department would likely be more amenable to corporate realignments of this kind.
Both the PGA Tour and LIV Golf are technically in their offseasons, though PGA Tour events for 2025 positioning and LIV Golf negotiations for player movement are underway.
