President Donald Trump gave the game away with a "simplistic" analogy when pressed by reporters on why he is taking a $400 million luxury plane from the Qatari government, wrote Shawn McCreesh for The New York Times on Monday — a gift far above and beyond anything a president has accepted from a foreign nation in modern history, and that even has some of Trump's most ardent supporters complaining smells rotten.
Specifically, he said, Trump offered up a parable that might be called "the president and the putt."
"This luxurious gift from the Qataris presented all sorts of concerns — ethical, legal, logistical, mechanical. There was also the fact that Mr. Trump had once described Qatar as a 'funder of terrorism at a very high level,'" wrote McCreesh. But how Trump chose to defend his actions spoke volumes.
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“There was an old golfer named Sam Snead. Did you ever hear of him?” said Trump.
Snead, he continued, had a way of doing things.
“When they give you a putt, you say, ‘Thank you very much.’ You pick up your ball, and you walk to the next hole. A lot of people are stupid. They say, ‘No, no, I insist on putting it.’ Then they putt it, they miss it, and their partner gets angry at them.”
In Trump's analogy, graciously accepting when your golf opponent lets you skip the last putt, McCreesh continued, is equivalent to "accepting a luxury jet from a foreign government."
But it puts a lot of Trump's ethics-challenged decisions into a mindset that makes more sense, McCreesh wrote.
"His family has six pending deals with a majority Saudi-owned real estate firm; Qatar is backing another Trump project; and the United Arab Emirates is getting in on the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures. His two oldest sons are currently hopscotching the globe, striking deals that directly benefit their father. He is also now selling access to himself to top buyers of the digital coin his family is marketing. Even the first lady is pushing crypto these days."
As far as Trump is concerned, McCreesh concluded, "all the world is a golf course, and only a fool would turn down a putt."