Donald Trump has used the U.S. golf team’s impressive comeback at the Presidents Cup on Sunday to make questionable claims about the number of adoring fans at the competition.
“It was a great tournament, and it was an honor, really an honor, to be involved,” Trump, 80, told a press gaggle at Joint Base Andrews that night while returning from the event to the White House. “It set a record for attendance, and I’ll bet it got great television ratings too, because it was very exciting. But the American team was unbelievable. A big, big win.”
Trump served as honorary chairman for this year’s tournament at Medinah Country Club outside Chicago. The U.S. team staged an impressive comeback on the last day of the tournament after trailing the international side through Friday and Saturday, turning the deficit into a 17-13 victory.
The president’s claims about record-breaking attendance came despite the fact that organizers had not released a final crowd figure for the event when he made his comments on Sunday. Those numbers remained pending on Monday.
Trump has spent much of his political career making wild claims about the sizes of audiences that turn out to see him, or even just events he happens to attend. The GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas earlier this month provided the latest example.
The president called it a “sold-out” success, even though organizers sent last-minute offers of free tickets and photos showed vast swathes of unoccupied seats.
Other notable occasions include his brags on the 2024 campaign trail that the crowd for his Jan. 6, 2021 speech near the White House matched or exceeded the turnout for Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington address. The House Jan. 6 committee, set up to investigate the riot that followed Trump’s rally, estimated the president’s audience at about 53,000. More than 250,000 turned out to hear King Jr. deliver his “I have a dream” speech.
The fixation dates back to the opening hours of his first presidency. Trump reportedly told CIA employees that his 2017 inauguration appeared to have attracted “a million, million-and-a-half people.” His first press secretary, Sean Spicer, insisted it was the biggest inauguration ever, despite photos showing that President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration drew substantially larger crowds.
The Presidents Cup is golf’s biennial contest between a 12-man American side and 12 players representing the rest of the world apart from Europe, whose golfers face the U.S. separately in the Ryder Cup.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
