Lindsey Graham golfs with Donald Trump AGAIN as senator who once called him ‘a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot’ has played 14 rounds with the president—far more than anyone else
- DailyMail.com and other news outlets have documented 112 rounds of golf that the president has played while in office
- Lindsey Graham has been there one-eighth of the time, playing with Trump every eight weeks on average; theey played in Florida on Monday
- Graham was a relentless Trump critic during the 2016 campaign, once saying, ‘You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell!’
- After they began their golf bromance, the South Carolina lawyer has been almost universally supportive of the New York billionaire
Donald Trump has played at least 14 rounds of golf with Sen. Lindsey Graham, including Monday’s 18 holes at the president’s course in West Palm Beach, Florida.
The long list of outings make the South Carolina Republican by far Trump’s most frequent guest on the links, judging from published accounts and White House pool reports. In second place, with six confirmed rounds, is acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.
The president has had at least 60 playing partners since taking office, including pro golf legends, rock stars, family members, diplomats and broadcasters.
The White House often declines to confirm who golfs with Trump, and he often visits his namesake country clubs without swinging a club, making it difficult to count how often he plays.
But DailyMail.com and other news outlets have documented 112 rounds since Inauguration Day. And Graham has been there one-eighth of the time, playing with the president every 8 weeks on average.
Graham famously changed his public view of the president after golfing with him for the first time in October 2017.
He was a relentless Trump critic during the 2016 campaign, warning the Republican Party that if the hard-charging, uncouth billionaire won their nomination, ‘we will get destroyed …… and we will deserve it.’
‘You know how you make America great again?’ he asked a CNN host, 13 days before dropping out of the presidential race in December 2015. ‘Tell Donald Trump to go to hell! He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.’
‘He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for,’ the senator continued, calling Trump the ISIS terror army’s ‘man of the year’ for stirring up jihadis with his dire pronouncements about Islamic terrorism.
‘I’d rather lose without Donald Trump than try to win with with him,’ Graham said then.
The senator continued his wry criticism well into 2017, and then found his Pauline road to Damascus somewhere on the front nine at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia on October 9.
From that day forward, Graham has been nearly perfectly consistent in his outward support for the president. One notable exception was his vocal objections when Trump withdrew American troops from northern Syria this year, abandoning a Kurdish faction to the less-than-tender mercies of the Turks.
The chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee tweeted during the campaign that Trump learned his foreign policy ‘from watching Television—the Cartoon Network.’
He warned that the GOp was ‘about to nominate the one person that could destroy the party for years to come.’
Just months into the Trump presidency, he proclaimed himself ‘all in.’
‘I am like the happiest dude in America right now. We have got a president and a national security team that I’ve been dreaming of for eight years,’ he said on ‘Fox & Friends’ in 2017, likely speaking to an audience of one.
That came before Trump reportedly turned on the charm during their first round of golf together, but their unexpected bromance was cemented by the time the pair walked off the 18th hole that October 9.
‘Really enjoyed a round of golf with President @realDonaldTrump today. President Trump shot a 73 in windy and wet conditions!’ Graham gushed on Twitter. ‘How bad did he beat me? I did better in the presidential race than today on the golf course! Great fun. Great host.’
More than two years later, Trump and Graham are regular foursome anchors. In September Trump partnered with PGA legend Gary Player in a match against Graham and Annika Sörenstam, who won a record 90 international women’s tournaments during her career.
‘They beat the hell out of us,” Player told the Associated Press afterward.
Graham name-checked Player’s golf nickname. ‘We defrocked the Black Knight and the president,’ he said.