‘America’s besieged, ratings-obsessed Commander-in-Chief cynically fantasises about McIlroy sprinkling stardust on his own grimy world’
Roy Curtis
06:05, 18 Apr 2026
Trump congratulated McIlroy on his back-to-back Masters wins(Image: Getty Images)
When the ever more unhinged incumbent of the White House made social media contact with Rory McIlroy, it felt like a setting sun chasing the midday glow of its rising equivalent.
In twilight shadow, a raving, unstable, brainsick crazy, one who, when not threatening global genocide, confuses himself with Jesus Christ. At a distant opposite pole of the spectrum, luminous and life-affirming, an athlete at his noontime pinnacle, one who chose Amen Corner to touch a kind of authentic golfing divinity.
On one side of the coin, an unravelling autocrat, his career built on nepotism and lies, the bulging catalogue of mayhem triggered by his catastrophic Iranian excursion having a Celtic flavour.
Rising prices at the pumps and the consequent chaotic and divisive fuel protests are just Trump’s latest unwanted transatlantic gift. Meanwhile, heads to the orange devil’s tails, a sportsman rising to new heights, his career built on the altogether more substantial foundations of talent and relentless pursuit of excellence, his latest electrifying Augusta excursion triggering chaotic and joyous celebrations across the island of his birth. A dangerous, deluded, figure of ridicule; and an Irishman born to greatness. Shade and light.
What Rory authored amid those towering Georgia pines had the depth and air of a great work of literature. A Homeric odyssey, heroic and unforgettable and epic in scale.
McIlroy’s life amounts to a substantial body of achievement of a kind beyond an American president who was taught in the cradle that throwing tantrums, making foul-mouthed threats and advertising your own intellectual shallowness offer a shortcut to getting what you want, when you want.
Rory McIlroy is presented the Green Jacket(Image: Getty Images)
Rory doesn’t do shortcuts. He won golf’s biggest tournament via a compelling exhibition, first of genius, then of resolve, not because he bellowed in the inane fashion of a spoilt child that he deserved it, as Trump did with the Nobel Prize.
Augusta National is among sport’s most evocative assembly halls, a palace for the senses that for a few days in April can feel like the capital of all the earth. In consecutive intoxicating springs, it has been McIlroy’s playground.
Rory’s relatability, the nerve-shredding and exhausting passage to glory he inevitably pursues, the dimensions of his fortitude and decency, his charisma and inexhaustible brilliance, his open-book honesty, all of these things combine to immerse the audience in his every adventure.
Last weekend in the Deep South offered that rare kind of theatre, the sort that reaches under the skin to scrape away all the grime of life. That reaches into the intestines and extracts all the melancholy lodged in the gut. Amid the crumbling masonry of American decency, McIlroy managed to construct something enduring and awe-inspiring and beautiful.
As with the Strait of Hormuz or Greenland or Venezuela, Donald Trump looked on covetously. His first thought: How he could pollute a pristine moment by stampeding into the narrative.
Rory was just another country for him to invade, a green jacket for a green-eyed monster to thieve. As with insulin pumped into the bloodstream of a diabetic, Trump’s hypoglycaemic ego requires constant injections of heavy-duty flattery to prevent the glucose levels of his insanity from spinning out of control.
US President Donald Trump(Image: Getty Images)
Only this week, it was revealed that the man with the fate of the planet in his hands drinks diet soda because he believes it kills cancer cells. Who needs chemo, when a slurp of Fanta or Diet Coke will do the trick? But then, the evidence of Trump’s cognitive decline was apparent as far back as Covid times when he advocated a shot of bleach as a means of conquering the virus.
With a fondness for pondering some imagined glories in his pedigree, propelled by a lascivious need to be at the centre of every photograph, Trump barges into moments of sporting history as he does wars. Clumsily. Ignorantly. And with self-serving, loudhailer proclamations.
Fresh from bringing some Lazarus back to life with one a single flash of fingertip divinity, unfilled by posting threats to wipe out thousands year old civilizations, Trump took to Truth Social – a place where both truth and sociability are noticeably elusive – to congratulate McIlroy on defending his Masters crown.
With those same fat fingertips, the ones that were healing hands in his quickly deleted God-complex post, now glued to the caps button on his phone, he declared the 36-year-old a “LEGEND.” But Trump being Trump, Rory was just a means of bulldozing into the celebration.
Sociopaths are incapable of feeling another’s joy. Inevitably, the post soon revealed its essential purpose: To use Rory as a marketing tool for Planet Donald. To make sure McIlroy shows up at Trump Doral, the Florida golf course hosting a PGA Tour event from next Thursday week to Sunday week.
America’s besieged, ratings-obsessed Commander-in-Chief cynically fantasises about McIlroy sprinkling stardust on his own grimy world. He imagines Rory’s 350-yard drives as a deflection from Epstein, inflation and his Iranian zombie apocalypse.
Trump, a creature devoid of communal heart, a mediocrity holding the world to ransom, finds himself incarcerated in a crisis of his own idiotic construction. Right now, in the jail cell of American public opinion, he needs Rory just as a penniless courtroom accused requires a bail bondsman.
Here’s where it gets really interesting. Trump’s golf course in Doonbeg hosts this year’s Irish Open in September. McIlroy and Shane Lowry are the oxygen without which the tournament would suffocate and die.
Shane Lowry celebrates with Rory McIlroy after his Masters win(Image: Joel Marklund/Augusta National/Getty Images)
Imagine the pair of them declined to turn up. For Trump, and his notoriously fragile ego, it would be crushing. The Strait of Hormuz: The Sequel. Admittedly, it is a hope that is likely to gather dust.
As we were reminded earlier in the week, McIlroy played a round of golf with Trump in 2017, accepting the invitation “out of respect for the office,” and triggering social media outrage. Bruised by the reaction and horrified by Trump’s clueless handling of the Covid crisis, McIlroy categorically announced he would not play golf with the president a second time.
In early 2025, on the eve of Trump’s second term inauguration, Rory went back on that promise, believing a round of golf with the president might help smooth the sport’s civil war between rival tours.
Whatever the noble intent, it had the feel of a rare McIlroy misstep, a misreading of the court of popular opinion. Trump is a tyrant, an ignorant ghoul upending the rules based order, the anti-democratic worm in his brain forging economic, social, cultural and political anarchy in every corner of the globe.
Reimagining his homeland as the Disunited States of America while fantasising about war crimes in foreign lands in an incoherent bombardment of terrifying social media threats.
Rejoicing in his own belligerent ignorance, deriving not a single life lesson from past mistakes. While it might be hard to envisage how McIlroy could immediately emulate a week when he set himself apart from the rest of the field, a flourish that would propel him to even greater heights of public affection.
And yet it would be so simple. Rory could borrow a favourite White House phrase from the Ronald Regan era and Just Say No to Trump’s invitations to Doral and Doonbeg.
A four-iron in the narcissistic soul of the American president, it would feel like a rare drumbeat of decency, an eloquent rebuke of a shameless peddler of global chaos.
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