SPECIAL REPORT: Donald Trump comments sum up the year that golf tore itself apart

And there he was, a former president shuffling to his kingdom’s first tee just after 9 a.m. It’s a clear, sunny morning on a track they call the Blue Monster, and this old beast is a chauffeur.

His swing is shaky, with more planes than Miami International, but Donald Trump has always been a man of end-over-means and contact is clean. It’s going for a nudge over 200 yards, with a slight hue to the right, but it’s dry and good enough.

“Can Biden do that?” he asks his small private gallery in Trump National Doral on Thursday. He answers his own question. ‘Do not think so.’

And there it goes again, the fairway followed by 10 Secret Service buggies and another with a blue cooler marked ‘beer’.

He believes that he has won a total of 19 club championships and that he has finished three of them. Commander in cheat, others call him, or Pele when alone in the rough, but golf violations are very low on his report card.

The time was when you could tell a lot about a person by how they treated themselves on a golf course. Today, the illusions of a higher-minded sport are less easy to sell. Not now in the era of LIV. Not with so many of his biggest names dropping their pretense for a fortune in Saudi Arabian money.

That’s why we’re here for the finale of their first season. And that’s why you have to wonder if Trump, married three times, has ever had a more fitting union. Trump and LIV, LIV and Trump, hand in hand in a glove placed around the throat of golf as we once knew it.

‘LIV? I love it,” he tells Sportsmail about the ropes at the second hole. ‘Unlimited money. It is awesome.’

The PGA Tour definitely disagrees. The DP World Tour definitely disagrees. Rory McIlroy, Tiger Woods – they definitely disagree. But if anyone knows a thing or two about riots and establishment looting, you could say it’s Donald Trump.

Is this the end of the beginning of something new and exciting, or the beginning of the end for the old world of golf? That depends on your appetite for debates about greed, sportswashing, and one of the most hostile takeovers in ballgame history.

Just over four months have passed since the asteroid hit a corner of St. Albans, and after six further events from Bangkok to Jeddah, the eighth and final of the year takes place here in Miami this week. In between, there are unresolved lawsuits, suspensions, bans, broken friendships between Ryder Cup teammates, small crowds of spectators on freebies, television packages given away to a small audience, and an astronomical budget spent on some of the best golfers to play the game.

Between Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau alone, recruitment costs have surpassed £600 million. That swells to nearly £1bn if you factor in Sergio Garcia, Lee Westwood, Henrik Stenson, Patrick Reed, Louis Oosthuizen, Martin Kaymer and Ian Poulter, before arriving at a dwindling number of players recently hit by Saudi Golf’s ‘mediocre’ was named chief executive Majed Al Sorour.

As a business plan, it has holes so big that Trump wouldn’t miss with a cold putter on his worst day. But as an act of guerrilla warfare it has no parallel in athletic pursuits, and if ever there was a hope among traditionalists that this circus would fail, it was an act of the utmost naivety.

Remember Wednesday’s press conference for what has been billed as team championships, where groups of four, under names like Majesticks, Stinger and Aces, will compete for the most ridiculous prize pool ever known in golf – $50 million.

On the podium were eight golfers, from Mickelson to Bubba Watson to Koepka to Cameron Smith. Together they held 15 major championships. Across the field, LIV players have accounted for 21 of the past 51 big winners. Either way, the talent acquisition has been massive, taking the start-up way past the point where one can laugh at its sporting prowess.

But how did the takeover go? And the toxicity and uncertainty it has generated? On that front, LIV has been miserably exposed, not least by the never-ending nonsense of their Commissioner Greg Norman, who said “we all make mistakes” in June when asked about the Saudi murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and he has rarely had his foot come out of his mouth since then.

From top to bottom, all you can do is grimace at some of the staging points to a remarkable saga, right down to a relatively minor act of brutality yesterday, when an obnoxious twitter account mocked a Rory McIlroy costume. Since McIlroy was LIV’s main opponent, the description of the kit included ‘little dick, ugly woman, poster of Jay Monahan (PGA Tour commissioner) in a thong’ – it was liked and later disliked by a senior member of the LIV communication team . Looking at this grimiest landscape, it’s only natural to wonder if LIV will ever become respectable once it’s grown out of such squalid conditions.

Golfers are an optimistic bunch. They must be – it is born of the hope that a bad shot can be followed by a good one. And such a theme has been thought of in abundance in the marble corridors of the Trump National Doral.

Sportsmail spoke to several of LIV’s biggest names this week, with an almost evangelical belief that the LIV tour was not only a necessary revolution, but one that will eventually prosper.

“I think it was amazing,” says Garcia, a former Masters champion who was once revered as Europe’s biggest Ryder Cup star and more recently heard European Tour rivals say they were all ‘f*****’ in a locker room tirade in Munich.

It is no exaggeration to say that there are those left behind on the traditional circuits who now cannot bear the sight of a man whose actions, and those of the other defectors, have seriously undermined the tours on which they have made their name.

“It certainly hasn’t been easy,” he adds. “But, you know, I think some people wanted to shoot me for whatever reason.”

DeChambeau is no less positive. “I had a great time,” he told Sportsmail. “The team aspect, the schedule, it was great. Much has already been said about it. I think discovery is an eye opener for many people and it will be for years to come.

“There’s a bit of hypocrisy going on at the moment and I can’t wait for that discovery phase of everything to show up and we’ll see how the cookie crumbles.

“For me, I love what we’re doing here and it will continue to grow.”

The rebellious golfers have taken on some quirky tales in all of this, with a tendency to stare at a fire of their own making while simultaneously begging everyone else, including McIlroy, to just go ahead and accept it.

Of course, that’s a distillation that doesn’t fully take into account the frustrations they felt about the status quo, but their views were often vulnerable to logic as well.

Depicting these golfers as washing clothes for an abhorrent regime is part of a wider debate, and arguably the strongest counterargument for governments like ours that have no problem selling billions of pounds worth of weapons to the Saudis. A moral stand by athletes who were already wealthy would be admirable, but in the end it has come down to the price of a blind eye.

For some like Paul Casey, who once spoke out about Saudi Arabia, it is believed to have been in eight figures. For Mickelson, who labeled them “scary mom ******,” it was an estimated $200 million.

Martin Kaymer, the two-time big winner, tells Sportsmail: “Some people who don’t know the ins and outs jump on the sports washes. But in my opinion, it’s very narrow-minded when you see the big picture of the world and where we’ve been going in the last 10 or 15 years. You have to see the facts.’

He is not wrong – golf tours and many other sports have long plunged into the Saudi oil well. Where the LIV golfers appear to be on shaky ground is their willingness to blow up the tours they’ve taken, resulting in a fragmentation of a sport that, for all its organizational flaws, was in good hands.

We may have limited sympathy for the tours — the PGA Tour built up a monopoly for years before deeper pockets came to town — but it wasn’t a system that needed a hostile invasion. As collateral damage, we’ve already seen a Ryder Cup captain leave Stenson, along with some of his greatest players, none of whom have shown much remorse for their role in potentially devaluing one of the greatest events in their sport.

Stenson, for his part, told me this week that he would take a “lie detector test” to refute the conspiratorial whispers that he was only accepting the captaincy as a way to take advantage of a better offer from LIV. Reasonable.

But what statements would bring out a player who, with a straight face, claims that golf on this track is similar in a deeper way to what he left behind? And that they don’t regret cashing in?

Unlimited money? Excellent? Trump was only half right.