- President Donald Trump recently recorded one of the best rounds of golf of his life on the USGA's score-tracking service, claiming to have shot an impressive 68.
- Many believe Trump is a prolific cheater on the course, and people on Twitter were quick to raise suspicion of Trump's shockingly good round.
- While it's impossible to know if Trump's score was submitted as legitimate, as a cheat, by mistake, or as a prank, Trump's 28-stroke improvement between rounds was bound to raise eyebrows.
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President Donald Trump had one of the best rounds of golf of his life if his latest submitted scorecard is to be believed.
The sportswriter Leif Skodnick tweeted an image that showed Trump claimed a score of 68 to GHIN, the USGA's handicap service, from a course that had a 75.3 rating.
—Leif Skodnick (@LeifSkodnick) May 17, 2019
Trump has a reputation of being a rather prolific cheater on the golf course, with playing partners sometimes calling him out for the tendency of his mishit balls off the tee to miraculously end up in the fairway.
Speaking with a Norwegian newspaper in 2018, the LPGA golfer Suzann Pettersen said that she had seen Trump's cheating up close.
"He cheats like hell. So I don't quite know how he is in business. They say that if you cheat at golf, you cheat at business," Pettersen said.
She continued: "He always says he is the world's best putter. But in all the times I've played him, he's never come close to breaking 80. But what's strange is that every time I talk to him, he says he just golfed a 69, or that he set a new course record or won a club championship someplace."
Between Trump's claim of a shockingly low score — it was 28 strokes lower than the last round that had been recorded with the service — and his reputation on the golf course, many people on Twitter were quick to cast doubt on the validity of the president's round.
—Travis Akers (@travisakers) May 17, 2019
—Harvey Lannak (@hlannakpga) May 17, 2019
—Greg_YNWA1 (@Greg_YNWA1) May 17, 2019
—Nick Clementi (@ClementiNick) May 17, 2019
As Dan Gartland at Sports Illustrated pointed out, the GHIN system is not the most secure of databases, needing only a seven-digit identification number in order to input a player's scores, so it's also possible that another person entered the suspicious score, either as a mistake or a prank.
While it's impossible to know what Trump's real score was unless you were on the grounds with him, the chances of a 72-year-old man improving by almost 30 strokes between rounds seem slim at best.
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