Trump uses Oval Office to hasten major golf merger — and further enrich his family: report

President Donald Trump held a strategy session in the Oval Office on how to expedite the merger between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, reported The New York Times on Monday — a merger from which his own family stands to gain substantial wealth.

According to Eric Lipton and Maggie Haberman the meeting included Jay Monahan, a PGA Tour executive, and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, chairman of LIV Golf, a Saudi Arabia-backed league.

In facilitating this meeting, Trump "was pushing a merger that relates to his own family’s financial interest," according to the report. "The Trump family is a LIV Golf business partner. The family has repeatedly hosted LIV tournaments at its golf venues, including one planned in April at the Trump National Doral in Miami for the fourth year in a row."

“None of this is very surprising unfortunately,” former federal prosecutor and Justice Department fraud adviser Hui Chen told the Times. “The entire force and power of the United States government is now part of the business support structure for the Trump family.”

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The merger itself, and the Trump family's partnership with LIV at its golf clubs, was highly controversial even before Trump was elected, because of the connection to Saudi Arabia and the fact that Trump went out of his way not to mete out consequences to the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after he is widely believed to have ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist and Saudi regime dissident Jamal Khashoggi during Trump's previous administration.

All of this is occurring against the backdrop of numerous ethical conflicts facing the Trump administration, the report noted.

For instance, "Not long before Mr. Trump took office, his family started to sell its own cryptocurrency token — earning along with its partners an estimated $100 million in transaction fees — just as Mr. Trump was preparing to sign an executive order directing his administration to draft new cryptocurrency regulations easing oversight of the industry."

Similarly, tech billionaire Elon Musk, who bankrolled much of the effort to elect Trump and now heads up his Department of Government Efficiency task force, has been accused of dismantling federal agencies in ways that potentially reduce oversight of his own businesses, including the gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau right as he plans to introduce financial transaction features to his X social media platform.