MAR-A-LAGO SOURCES URGE TRUMP TO RECUSE HIMSELF FROM “FORE!” DEBATE, CITING A LIFETIME OF NEVER HAVING SAID IT
PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump declared Washington’s East Potomac Golf Links “extremely dangerous” this week, blaming fairways “far too close together, leading to a constant barrage of people being hit with wayward shots, and the echoing throughout the fairway of the word, ’FORE!’” Unnamed sources at Mar-a-Lago say the President should probably sit this one out. He is, they note, the one golfer in America who has never had to say it.
The President does not shout warnings, the sources explained, because warnings are a function performed for him by other people. When he plays, the fairway ahead is cleared in advance, and any golfer who might wander into range is relocated by men in sunglasses. “A civilian yells ’Fore!’ because he is the warning system,” one source said. “The President travels with one.”
On the rare occasion a bystander is struck, the sources said, the response is equally institutional: the injured party is whisked by the Secret Service to the West Palm Beach VA Medical Center, where treatment begins, promptly and competently, once the paperwork is complete. The paperwork is a nondisclosure agreement. It covers the incident, the ball, and the score the President recorded on the hole. The hospital declined to comment, citing the agreement.
East Potomac regulars, informed that their course had been declared a menace, said the echoing word the President objects to is simply what golf sounds like when played by people who can be sued. “Out here, you hit it, you yell, because you’re the one who pays for where it lands,” said one longtime player, who asked not to be named because his slice is well known. A federal judge halted the President’s renovation of the course on Monday; the President has vowed to close it November 15 anyway.
Dr. Marcia Hale, professor of political science and director of the Institute for Civic Reconciliation at Kestrel State University, and a staff political consultant to this newspaper, said the dispute is best understood as two different sports. “’Fore!’ is tort law you can hear,” she said. “It exists because the person who struck the ball bears the cost of where it comes down. A golfer who bears no cost — legal, financial, or reputational — never develops the reflex. What the President hears at East Potomac as a safety problem is, to everyone else on the course, the sound of accountability, working as designed.”
At press time, the sources had one request of their own. If the President does visit the redesigned East Potomac when it reopens, they said, he should be told the local custom in advance, so the word doesn’t startle him.
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