LIV Golf’s latest stop brings together Trump, Saudi Arabia and plenty of criticism

The controversy that has come to define the Saudi-financed breakaway tour at the heart of professional golf’s civil war has redoubled this week as the LIV Golf Invitational Series stages its third event at the Old Course at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, the bucolic New Jersey township 45 miles west of New York City.

The upstart circuit bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has enticed some of the sport’s biggest names, including Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau, with exorbitant $25m purses, nine-figure signing-on fees and an assemblage of perks that would be considered too garish for a reality TV show. It has also drawn fierce backlash from critics who accuse the Saudi government of using sports to launder the kingdom’s dismal human rights record, alleged ties to the September 11 attacks, severe repression of women’s and LGBTQ+ rights and the 2018 murder of the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

But for all the focus on the Saudi regime, the opportunity for Trump to return his golf business to the public eye and attain a long-sought role as a big-time sports powerbroker is just as relevant a plotline.

The former US president has always placed a premium on sport as an inextricable stripe of American life and bought in accordingly. He owned a team in the upstart United States Football League in the early 1980s, ponied up eight-figure fees to host prizefights at his Atlantic City casino before it went bankrupt, financed an American alternative to the Tour de France – the predictably named Tour de Trump – and made a splashy but failed bid for the NFL’s Buffalo Bills in the 2010s.

As the walls closed in during the final days of his presidency, his Twitter