President Donald Trump has been in the middle of talks between the PGA Tour and PIF this year, but his involvement in the highest levels of the game dates back more than a decade before he was first elected.
Trump, an avid golfer, bought Trump National Doral in 2012 and put millions of dollars into refurbishing the course. But the PGA Tour moved away from Doral — a place it had played since 1962 — in 2016, after the tournament there lost its title sponsorship from Cadillac.
With Trump as its ally, LIV Golf has now played four consecutive years at the course, the only venue to host a LIV tournament in each of its first four seasons.
The president’s Trump National Golf Club Bedminster was supposed to host the 2022 PGA Championship, but just days after the Jan. 6, 2021, events at the U.S. Capitol, the PGA of America pulled the event, moving it to Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa.
Trump has been an ardent supporter of LIV Golf since its launch in 2022, and has hit back against both the PGA of America and PGA Tour for their moves away from his courses.
“The PGA [Tour] was not loved by a lot of the players, as you know, for a long time,” he told the New York Times in 2022 as LIV played an event at the very Bedminster course the PGA of America moved away from. Trump also said the tour “hasn’t acted well.”
But Trump’s position has shifted in the years since the tour and PIF have been negotiating an investment deal. Trump hosted PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan and players Tiger Woods and Adam Scott, along with the PIF’s Yasir Al-Rumayyan, at the White House in February in an attempt to hash out a deal.
There was optimism going into the meeting that an agreement would be reached, but the meeting went sideways, sources said, and the groups have not met again.
In the days after the meeting, Trump was asked if it would be more difficult to solve the PGA Tour/PIF issue or a peace deal between Russia and the Ukraine, and the president quipped that the golf deal was “much more complicated.”
Now nearly two months since that White House meeting, a deal does not appear closer. The PGA Tour has had a strong spring commercially, both with sponsors and on TV. Al-Rumayyan, meanwhile, remains a staunch supporter of LIV in its current team and global format, something the tour has not been in favor of.
