You almost couldn’t tell whether Donald Trump’s New Jersey golf course was hosting a supposedly big-time pro golf tournament or a weekday golf best-ball fundraiser for the Bedminster YMCA.
The crowds, if you can call a couple thousand people scattered over 520 acres a crowd, were tiny, as was the reach of the LIV Golf Series event on its streaming platforms, peaking at around 94,000 viewers on YouTube during Saturday’s second round.
For a frame of reference, the PGA Tour’s Canadian Open peaked at 3.7 million viewers, roughly 40 times the best the LIV could do.
Tickets for the event, meanwhile, were reportedly going for $1 apiece on StubHub.
Not that the Saudis care, because the interest of the royal family, which is bankrolling LIV Golf, isn’t in making money off golf; the harebrained scheme is to build PR goodwill to distract from things like the Saudi-directed murder and dismemberment of American journalists and the family’s financing of the 9/11 attacks.
An added benefit is the comic effect of the Saudis showing how easy it is to buy and sell the carny huckster Trump, who never met a harebrained scheme he didn’t like, or dirty money that he wouldn’t put in his bank account.
As for the golf tournament, somebody won, presumably, though it doesn’t matter who.
This was the tree in a forest with nobody there to hear it, so it didn’t make a sound.
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Chris Graham
