That’s the point. It’s not about fairness or equality. It’s about privilege.
Trump doesn’t think everyone should be allowed to cheat. He thinks he should be allowed to cheat while everyone else is handicapped by playing by the rules. He feels he should have an advantage because he’s a powerful person.
Trump followers believe that if they support Trump, they’re joining the winning side. Some of Trump’s power will rub off on them. And they will be able to push people around in their lives like Trump pushes people around in his life.
Trump knows this is nonsense. He takes power from his supporters; he doesn’t give it away to them.
I’m afraid that I made a Trump out of myself: after dismissing the need for me to buy that book earlier in this thread I went and bought it yesterday. Ricky Reilly does a great job of describing how much DJT lies and I believe every single word of what he writes because except to people who still defend him it’s pretty obvious what kind of “character” DJT possesses.
I’d suspect that anyone who’s played with him would recognize that he has some talent at the game, as Nars Ginley noted above – and by “good golfer,” I’d expect that they mean that he hits the ball pretty well, doesn’t get the ball into trouble particularly often, putts reasonably well, etc. No amount of cheating would hide being completely incompetent at the game, especially if you’re on the course with people who are, in fact, good at the game. Cheating won’t hide an inability to hit the ball more than 100 yards, slicing every shot, not being able to sink a 10-foot putt, etc.
One can be pretty good, in that way, but still not be likely to win matches (especially because “a good 70 year old golfer” is still 70, and isn’t going to be able to play a competitive match against better / younger golfers), and that’s where the petty cheating comes into play.
Trump strikes me as the kind of golfer who, on a good day, could score in the mid-to-high 80s, but if he made a mistake at any time and ended up in the deep rough or a sand trap, his first instinct would be to cheat his way out of the problem. If that was not an option because people were watching him, he would probably make a few angry attempts at recovery, likely make things worse, then quit in anger while blaming his caddy.
Coincidentally, that’s how I also view his presidency.
So Trump hit a ball into the water, the son of another golfer who’s about 10 or 11 hit his onto the green, then Trump had his caddie switch balls so he could putt and had the caddie inform the kid it was his that went into the water.
Now, what’s wrong with this picture? The son was apparently an adult in his 20s, so Rick Reilly has set the record straight. Which now makes that anecdote as uninteresting to me as the rest of this thread.