The traits Trump exhibits on the golf course serve as a metaphor for his approach to life and politics: a willingness to bend the rules and win at any cost

American sportswriter Rick Reilly wrote a book called Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, to explain Donald Trump’s incorrigible ways. He alludes to Trump’s self-claimed prowess in Golf and his purported handicap of 2.8 by a fawning Golf Digest by saying, “If Trump is a 2.8, Queen Elizabeth is a pole vaulter.”

However, perhaps the most damning reality check for Trump is the fact that both his ‘wingman’ (former and current) i.e., Vice President Mike Pence and his current running mate, JD Vance, would have the maximum access to Trump and know him as a person, have been critical – even if expediency forces Vance to conveniently renege from his earlier views and for Pence says a lot with his deafening silence and refusal to endorse his former boss’s candidature.

For all his matching vitriol, boorishness (remember, ‘childless cat ladies’) and Oorah-style brouhaha as a former Marine, JD Vance was once stoutly anti-Trump. Vance had once declared himself as a ‘never-Trump guy’ and called Trump ‘reprehensible’ and an ‘idiot’. Vance then had the clarity to articulate the reason for his non-support of Trump by insisting, “The reason, ultimately, that I am not…is because I think that (Trump) is the most raw expression of a massive finger pointed at other people.”

In the 2016  US Presidential elections, Vance had rationalised Trump’s authoritarian, illiberal and intolerant ways by slamming, “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a-hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler”! For all his matching vitriol, boorishness (remember, ‘childless cat ladies’) and Oorah-style brouhaha as a former Marine, JD Vance was once stoutly anti-Trump.

Vance had once declared himself as a ‘never-Trump guy’ and called Trump ‘reprehensible’ and an ‘idiot’.  He was quick to ‘take down’ uncomfortable views that he had expressed about Trump like the one he had put about the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape where Trump had shockingly claimed that fame had enabled him to grope women!

Then Vance had heeded to his moral conscience as a practising Christian and lamented, “Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord help us”. But all his conscience came to nought at the altar of political ambition as Vance meekly retracted later, “I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy”.

With that, everything was supposedly forgotten, and Vance now ‘presumably’ sees Trump as a paragon of Christian values, morality, and dignity that America needs for the future!

Meanwhile, the elephant in the room who says a lot by not speaking at all is former Vice President Mike Pence – once the most devout and virtuous of Christians who was earlier the most loyal confidante of Trump. Presumably, the die-hard Republican had put up with all of Trump’s crassness in the silent hope that the Republican Presidency would set things right with conservative and far-right policies, as any committed Republican would have hoped.

Much as he remained loyal to the bitter end, Pence did finally put fealty to the Constitution above the unreasonable demands of a man he had once slavishly addressed as ‘my President’, on the fateful 6th January 2021.

That Trump had showed his true character by shrugging his shoulders with a ‘so what’ refrain when told that Pence was at physical risk with rioters chanting ‘hang Mike Pence’, is a footnote in the long history of Trump’s unhinged, amoral and reckless politics. Importantly, Pence had held his head, heart, and soul intact, when he played a pivotal role in saving America’s democracy by confirming the electoral process and result, to the utter dismay of Trump.

Pence was to later reflect philosophically, “like the Bible says, at some point, you’ve just got to wipe the dust off your feet and go your separate ways”. In Trump’s golfing world, the term ‘Mulligan’ (an extra stroke allowed after a poor shot) is best applicable to Pence’s tumultuous tenure, unceremonious parting, and subsequent redemption with the Trump era.

Today, the forgotten image of Pence is reflective of the conundrum that many committed Republicans face in Trump’s candidature – he refuses to support Trump after “all that he has done” and cannot bring himself to endorse a partisan rival, Kamala Harris, either.

This lurking ambiguity in Republican ranks (or amongst the ‘undecided’) could tilt things decisively in the forthcoming cliffhanger of a Presidential contest. Meanwhile Trump’s view of his former ‘wingman’ Pence is as expected of a cribbing, complaining and bitter man who vaingloriously claims that Pence lacked the ‘courage’ and ‘stamina’ in the ultimate bidding.

Even Vance’s own mealymouthed and almost forced views on Trump’s “stolen mandate” in the 2020 Presidential elections are also, hardly convincing.

This is situationally reflective of the ‘cultlike campaign’ of Donald Trump that is hoping to cross the bridge even if it tramples on imperatives that are constitutional, moral or ideological/partisan, as in Donald Trump’s world, if you can cheat in Golf.

You can surely cheat in life – winning at any cost is only an extension of the selfish and deceitful spirit that represents Donald Trump.

(The writer, a military veteran, is a former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry; the views expressed are personal)