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Donald Trump is the worst cheat ever and he doesnt care who knows, Rick Reilly says as he describes a man he has known for 30 years. I always say golf is like bicycle shorts. It reveals a lot about a man. And golf reveals a lot of ugliness in this president.

Reilly, the former Sports Illustrated columnist, has written a book called Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump. Its rattling good fun which also depicts the startling duplicity of the president as a golfer. Youre mostly laughing, Reilly says, but at times youre crying how did this happen? As a golfer he really offends me. Cheating? Hate that. Driving carts on greens? Hate that. Wearing old dockers two sizes too small for him? Give me a break. Kicking your ball so often the caddies call you Pel? I so hate that. Most of all I hate how stupid hes making my country look. I hate what hes doing to my planet. I hate what hes doing to kids at the border. I dont mind Republicans. I just cant stand this guy. I love golf and he has set the game back 30 years. Just when it was becoming cool with Rory McIlroy and Rickie Fowler we get this fat bozo cheating his ass off.

Dr Lance Dodes, a Harvard psychiatrist, tells Reilly that Trump is a very ill man who exhibits all the traits of a narcissistic personality disorder. Reilly sighs. Its terrible he should cheat at golf which is the one sport where we self-regulate. There are referees in every other sport but in golf, if youre 200 yards away, you can kick the ball and get away with it. I called the National Golf Foundation. They said 90% of golfers dont cheat. Golf is an honest game but this guy leaves a big ugly orange stain on it. It really pisses me off.

He took the only gimme chip in Ive ever seen. A chip is a gimme? Trumps pretty good off the tee but he chips like Edward Scissorhands

Reillys anger towards Trump is made more interesting by the fact they have known each other for so long and that he admits he once almost liked the billionaire. I liked him as a writer because hes a crazy fabulist who tells lies so big they can float in the Macys parade. Hes great copy. If he says, Can you be here tomorrow for an interview? Id be on the red eye. I would do anything to get that interview but if I had to play golf with him again, and it wasnt for an article, Id never do it.

The first time I met him we were playing in the Pebble Beach Pro-Am [in the late 1980s]. He comes over and says, Its Rick Reilly, the greatest sportswriter in the world. Theres always an angle with Trump. Marla Marples was his wife then and she said, Hes your biggest fan. Look! She pulled one of my columns out of her purse like this is a set up. He wanted me to write a column about him but I had this idea of writing a book where I caddie for famous people. So we make a day for me to caddie for him but I turn up and he didnt have anybody to play with. So I played him. That was the day he took the only gimme chip in Ive ever seen. A chip is a gimme? Trumps pretty good off the tee but he chips like Edward Scissorhands. Hell cheat you on the course and then buy you lunch.

Trump introduced Reilly to other people after their game. He couldnt just call me a writer. Hed say, Meet Rick hes the president of Sports Illustrated. He would introduce me to another guy. Hey, Rick, meet Luigi voted best hamburger chef in the world. Luigis like What? No, I wasnt. Trump wants to be a winner by pretending youre someone huge.

His lies were hilarious until he becomes the most powerful man in the world. Then it got scary. I dont know what his plan is for my kids and grandkids. I dont know whos going to pay off this giant debt hes created to give his fat-cat buddies a tax cut. Look what he did [last] week in London. He pissed off two of our best allies. Its terrifying.

Trumps deceit about his golfing achievements motivated Reilly to resume writing. I was retired, living in Italy for three months a year, drinking Campari. I kept seeing on my Twitter feed [Reilly mimics Trump]: Im a champion. You should vote for me because Ive won 18 club championships. Whoa! Thats a lie because you already told me how you did it. Whenever you open a new course, you play by yourself and declare yourself the first club champion. Im like, Thats a shitty lie.

He even said: This is against the best players in the club. No strokes given. What? I played with you. Youre a 10-handicapper at best. Theres no way youre winning a club championship. I soon discovered many of them are senior championships for guys over 60 or 70. Thats a nice honour but its not within a par 5 of beating the clubs best players. Lots of guys said he wasnt even in town when some championships were decided. He claimed to have won a tournament in New Jersey when he was actually in Philly. My dad would flip over three times in his grave and he was a Reagan Republican.

This was on golf.com first but three different people told me this story. Trump was in Singapore with Kim Jong-un and there was a club championship at Trump International in Florida. Ted Virtue [the businessman who produced the movie Green Book] won the club championship. A few months later Trump sees him on the course. He drives over in his cart, followed by his Swat team in another 30 carts. Virtue and his son are on the 9th hole. Trump says: Ted, congratulations but you didnt really win because I wasnt there. Lets play these last nine holes for the championship. Virtue says: Thanks but Im with my son. Trump wont take no for an answer. Your son can play too. What can Virtue do? This is the president. This is his course. They get to a hole with a lake in front of the green. Ted and his son hit the green but Trumps ball goes in the water. Trump races off in his cart and by the time they reach the green Trump is lining up the sons putt. The caddie has switched balls. The son says: Thats my ball! Trumps caddie says: No, this is the presidents ball. Your ball went in the water. How bad is that? Thats insane. Trump makes the putt and goes one up to win. He says to Virtue: 'We'll be co-champions'. My buddy took a picture of Trump's locker and it says '2018 men's champion'. There is no mention of a co-champion. Trump cheated and won.

What would Reillys father, who loved Jack Nicklaus, have said if he heard Trump claim his handicap was lower than the 18-times major winner? Trump insists he plays off a 2.8 handicap, while Nicklaus, aged 79, admits his handicap is now 3.5. My dad would say, Ill take Nicklaus, you take Trump, and the loser has to sweep the streets of New York for the rest of their lives. Do you know how Trump does it? He has recorded only 20 scores in eight years even though he plays more golf than any other president. I put in my every score in the computer because thats what you do in golf. At my club guys will put in your score for you if youre avoiding it. Trump doesnt put in scores. Thats so unethical.

He rolls his eyes when I say Britain can hardly claim to have an ethical prime minister in Boris Johnson. Are you kidding? Trump makes your guy look like Churchill. That guy [Johnson] looks like a genius.

Reilly has clearly enjoyed writing about Trumps shameless shenanigans but he is disappointed the president has remained unusually silent about his book. This guy will tweet about a bad postcard but I cant get a tweet to save my life. If he did tweet I know what hed say. Rick Reilly? I kicked his ass. He swings like a girl. This is FAKE NEWS!!! Hes got a buddy in LA whos also my buddy. They talk once a week. My buddys said: Dont get in a Twitter war with Reilly. Youll look stupid. And dont say a word about the book. Youll just fuel sales. I said to my buddy: Who asked you?

Ive offered Trump a $100,000 charity bet to play him. He has not responded. Id bet my house I can beat him as long as there is a camera on both of us but hes not going to play me. Hes not going to testify to the impeachment hearing because he cant stop lying. And when you lie in front of Congress, you go to jail for perjury. As soon as he plays me in front of TV cameras it would come out how bad he is.

Trump likes to denigrate his enemies as losers and so the final line of Reillys book suggests that, when the president looks at his reflection, he will see the face of a loser. Reilly nods. That was on purpose. My dad always told us that if you cheat then, ultimately, youre cheating yourself. I wanted that to be the last word in the book because he is a loser. Hes the biggest loser Ive ever met.

Rick Reillys Commander in Cheat is published by Headline

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Rick Reilly: Donald Trump will cheat you on the golf course and then buy you lunch - The Guardian

But his latest one could terrify the president.

President Donald Trumps eldest son on Monday posted a doctored picture of his dad shirtless, and with a shark on his shoulders to Instagram.

It was an attack on the impeachment inquiry into Trump over the Ukraine scandal. However, former porn star Stormy Daniels has claimed Trump (with who she reportedly had an affair) is terrified of sharks.

Haters will say its fake, read the caption on the edited snap.

Ive heard from the same reliable sources that the Democrats have used during their sham impeachment inquiry that this is in fact very real, wrote Trump Jr.

The image appears to have emanated from this 2003 WWE SummerSlam commercial starring wrestler Brock Lesnar:

Trump Jr. has previously shared a Pornhub-style meme of his father:

Trump as a Christmas ornament:

Read more from the original source:
Donald Trump Jr. Shares Bonkers Meme Of His Dad That Could Terrify The President - HuffPost

As Donald Trump flew to Florida on Saturday for a pair of political events, he could look back on what had been the best and worst of weeks. On Wednesday, he returned from a summit in London to mark the seventieth anniversary of NATO, where a hot mike captured some of his fellow world leaders mocking him. Less than twenty-four hours later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed that the House Judiciary Committee will proceed with drafting articles of impeachment against Trump, which all but assured that he will become only the fourth President in historyalong with Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clintonto have an impeachment proceeding against him be approved by committee and referred to the full House for a vote. But, after all this, Trump received a big political boost on Friday when the Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy had created two hundred and sixty-six thousand jobs in November, far more than expected. The unemployment rate last month was just 3.5 per cent, which matched the lowest it had been in fifty years.

Trump was jubilant. GREAT JOBS REPORT!, he tweeted on Friday morning. Even allowing for the facts that the monthly job figures bounce around and come with a sizable margin of error attached, it was hard to argue with his assessment. On Wall Street, the consensus forecast had been for job growth of a hundred and eighty-seven thousand, which in itself would have been a pretty strong number. It reflected strong hiring across the huge services sector, which these days employs about eighty per cent of all working Americans. The biggest job gains came in health care, leisure and hospitality, and professional services. But even the manufacturing sector, which has been hit hard by Trumps trade wars, added fifty-four thousand jobs, only some of which were accounted for by the end of a strike at General Motors.

Of course, Trumps claim to have created the strong labor market is baseless. The current economic expansion began in 2009, under Barack Obama, and employment growth has been remarkably steady since then. But all Presidents tend to receive credit when the economy does well and criticism when it does badly, even if their policies have little to do with it. At the end of 2018, the rate of G.D.P. growth dipped, the stock market fell, and it seemed possible that Trump would be going into next years election campaign saddled with an economy that was weakening sharplya fear heightened by the continuation of his trade wars. These concerns have now receded. Todays job report, more than any other report in recent months, squashed any lingering concerns about an imminent recession in the U.S. economy, Gad Levanon, an economist at the Conference Board, told CNBC on Friday. Employment growth also shows no signs of slowing further despite the historically low unemployment rate.

The Labor Department also reported that wages are still rising. Over the past year, average hourly earnings have risen by 3.1 per cent, while the rate of consumer-price inflation is just 1.8 per cent. And lately, wage gains have picked up further. According to Ian Shepherdson, the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, hourly wages for non-supervisory/production workers increased at an annual rate of 4.1 per cent in the past three months. Thats the highest rate since September, 2008, which was the month Lehman Brothers collapsed. So workers purchasing power is going up, and so are over-all household incomes. Indeed, Bloomberg News pointed out that, by one measure of wages, the rate of wage growth is now higher than the average interest rate on thirty-year mortgagesthe first time this has been true since Nixon was President. To be sure, many Americans still havent benefitted much, if at all, from the long recovery. And there are enormous public concerns about issues like the costs of health care and housing, as well as rising inequality and corporate greed, which the Democrats will rightly emphasize in the general election. But, at this stage, the headline economic figures are positive.

What is the likely political impact of all this? Chris Cillizza, of CNN, showed no doubt on Friday. The latest economic numbers... make one thing very clear: President Donald Trump has a path to win a second term next year, he wrote. After reciting some of the good economic news, which includes the stock market hitting new highs, Cillizza delivered a little history lesson. Setting aside Gerald Ford, who is a special case because he took over after Nixon resignedand then later pardoned him, to disastrous political effectsonly two Presidents since the Second World War have lost relection contest. They were Jimmy Carter, in 1980, and George H. W. Bush, in 1992: both of them were handicapped by a weak economy. The data then is clear, Cillizza concluded. Its very, very hard to beat an incumbent president unless the economy is seen by a majority of the public to be weakening badly.

But that isnt the end of the storya fact that Cillizza acknowledged in the second half of his piece. For one thing, in our polarized political environment, the economy seems to play less of a role than it used to do in determining voters attitudes toward the President and politics in general. This trend was evident during the last Administration, when Obamas approval ratings remained middling despite a slow but steady recovery from the Great Recession. Since Trump entered the White House, the trend has been even more evident. His approval numbers are 15 points lower than where youd have expected them to be, John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University who has studied this issue closely, told Greg Ip, of the Wall Street Journal. In a sharp column, Ip noted that the strong economy didnt prevent the Democrats from making big gains in the 2018 midterm elections and in local elections last month, in Virginia and other states. Moreover, many of these gains came in affluent suburbs, where the value of peoples houses and retirement portfolios have been rising strongly.

In another of his tweets on Friday, Trump paraphrased the famous quote from the political consultant James Carville, writing, Its the economy, stupid. These days, it isnt only the economy, though. Inevitably, the 2020 election will also be a referendum on Trumps conduct as President. Some voters may be willing to set aside Trumps scandals, aberrant behavior, and controversial policies and focus exclusively on the state of the economy, but many, many others wont. This implies that the ongoing political battles, particularly those over impeachment, may well have more impact on the election than some commentators have argued. For example, the Democrats, simply by going through with their threat to deploy the ultimate constitutional weapon that is available to Congress against Trump, will rally many of the local activists whose enthusiasm and involvement they will need next year. In that sense, as I noted in a column on Friday, impeachment is already a win for the Democrats.

But it also matters how things play out over the next few weeks, as the House Judiciary Committee files articles of impeachment, the full House votes on them, and the action moves to the Senate for a trial under the purview of the Chief Justice, John Roberts. On Friday, the White House indicated that it will continue to boycott the House proceedings. In a letter to Jerry Nadler, the Democratic head of the Judiciary Committee, Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, said, You should end this inquiry now and not waste even more time with additional hearings. This brazen defiance was only the latest example of the White Houses refusal to coperate in any way with the impeachment inquiry, a stance that is itself grounds for impeachment, the Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman pointed out during his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. A President who will not coperate with an impeachment inquiry is putting himself above the law, Feldman said. Putting yourself above the law as President is the core of an impeachable offense because if a President could not be impeached for that, he would in fact not be responsible to anybody.

While Trump and his aides were scoffing at the impeachment inquiry from the White House, Rudy Giuliani, Trumps personal lawyer and a key figure in the Ukraine scandal, was taking his defiance even further, essentially raising his middle finger from Kyiv. Even though his business dealings are now under federal investigation, and one of his Ukrainian associatesLev Parnasis reportedly coperating with the Feds, Giuliani returned this week to the Ukrainian capital, where he is said to be helping a right-wing U.S. media outlet, One America News Network, put together a documentary about his discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine, and not Russia, was responsible for hacking the e-mails of Democrats during the 2016 election. The fact that Giuliani is back in Ukraine is like a murder suspect returning to the crime scene to live-stream themselves moon dancing, Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor and Trump supporter, told the Washington Post. Its brazen on a galactic level. And so, the madness goes on.

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What Does a Strong Jobs Report Mean for Trumps Relection Chances in 2020? - The New Yorker

Investors are ill-prepared for the possibility of President Donald Trump walking away from talks aimed at cementing the "phase one" China trade deal that was announced in principle in October, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Monday.

"I think people continue to believe that there's going to be a deal because they think it's rational, 'Why not do a deal? It's good for both sides,'" Cramer said about what he sees as conventional wisdom on Wall Street.

However, Trump feels "prodded by the Chinese, humiliated," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street," pointing to what he calls the latest "provocation" China's Communist Party reportedly ordering all state offices to remove foreign hardware and software within three years. The order, as described by the Financial Times, could hit major U.S. firms including Microsoft, Dell and HP.

The policy is seen as a direct move against U.S. technology firms during the 17-month-long U.S.-China trade war, which has spilled over into an economic dispute, including how Beijing subsidizes its tech industry.

"Why should there be a deal?" asked Cramer, a supporter of the president's hard-line approach to try to force China to open up its markets. "It's provocation."

For its part, the U.S. has effectively blacklisted Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei on national security concerns about whether China could use Huawei equipment to spy. Huawei has repeatedly said those concerns are unfounded.

Ahead of Sunday's deadline for new American tariffs on Chinese goods, "it's fish or cut bait time and I think that the cut bait is, 'Thanks for nothing China,'" Cramer said. The planned Dec. 15 tariffs on products, including smartphones and laptops, would be on top of the billions and billions of dollars of levies that Washington and Beijing have already imposed on each others' imports.

"[Trump] wants some sign, some sign that the Chinese want to do a deal, so that he can do it," according to the "Mad Money" host's read on the situation. "I think the president is increasingly saying, 'If they're going to continue in my face to not what to do a deal, I'm happy to walk away.' So I think that's the tenor of things right now."

On Friday, Cramer said on CNBC that the strong November jobs report gives Trump cover. "The president can walk away from the table with this number," highlighting the unemployment rate last month dipping to 3.5%, matching a 50-year low. Cramer has said the U.S. stock market hovering around record highs is also a feather in Trump's cap in trade negotiations.

Top Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow, a former CNBC personality who used to host a show with Cramer, said the president is prepared to walk away from a China deal if he doesn't get the terms he wants. However, Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council and a self-described free trader, also said Friday that the U.S. and China are "close" to a deal.

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Cramer: Investors are not prepared for Trump walking away on China trade, but they should be - CNBC

Donald Trump called for the population of Seoul to be moved during an Oval Office meeting when tensions between the US and North Korea were at their height, according to a new book about the presidents relations with the US military.

In Trump and his Generals: The Cost of Chaos, the national security and counter-terrorism expert Peter Bergen also gives new details of Trumps demands that the families of US service members in South Korea be evacuated, which the North Korean regime would have interpreted as a clear move towards war. In both cases, Trumps impetuous diktats were ignored by his top officials.

Bergens book, the latest in a string of accounts of the presidents erratic leadership on national security issues, is being published on Tuesday at a time when friction between Washington and Pyongyang is once more on the rise, after more than 18 months of detente and summitry. The North Korean leadership is threatening a resumption of missile tests, and a war of words between Trump and Kim Jong-un is simmering once more.

Trump has resurrected his nickname for Kim, Rocket Man. North Korea conducted a missile engine test at a site that it had previously mothballed, and on Monday a senior regime official called the US president a heedless and erratic old man.

The level of mutual hostility is still some way off from the worst period in 2017 when a conflict looked a real possibility.

In his book, Bergen a vice-president of the New America thinktank describes an Oval Office meeting on North Korea in mid-April 2017, after a string of North Korean missile tests. Trumps top national security officials were present and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had made a model of a secret North Korean facility the size of coffee table, to illustrate the regimes covert programmes.

According to Bergen, Trump was also shown a satellite image of the Korean peninsula at night, showing the lights of China and South Korea and the blackness of North Korea in between. Trump initially mistook the void for an ocean. When he was shown the bright lights of Seoul just 30 miles south of the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas, the president asked: Why is Seoul so close to the North Korean border?

Trump had been repeatedly told that US freedom of action against North Korea was constrained by the fact that the regimes artillery could demolish the South Korean capital in retaliation for any attack, inflicting mass casualties on its population of 25 million.

They have to move, Trump said, according to Bergen, who adds that his officials were initially unsure if the president was joking. But Trump then repeated the line. They have to move!

No action was taken in response to Trumps bizarre remark, but the situation grew steadily worse, with a series of North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile tests and a hydrogen bomb test in September 2017.

After watching a retired four-star general, Jack Keane, interviewed on Fox News in late January 2018, saying that US troops deployed to South Korea should not take their families with them, Bergen reports that Trump told his national security team: I want an evacuation of American civilians from South Korea.

A senior official warned that such an evacuation would be interpreted as a signal that the US was ready to go to war, and would crash the South Korean stock market, but Trump is reported to have ignored the warning, telling his team: Go do it!

Alarmed Pentagon officials ignored the order, and according to Bergen Trump eventually dropped the idea. It was one of a number of occasions that the defense secretary at the time, James Mattis, ignored direction from the White House. He also refused to send defense department officials to a planned Korea war game at Camp David in the autumn of 2017, or to provide military options for intercepting North Korean ships suspected of sanctions busting.

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Trump called for Seoul evacuation at height of North Korea tensions, new book says - The Guardian