Two weekends in a row. Two golf tournaments. Both at properties with the Trump name on them. And the ethics questions are piling up faster than the president can sink a putt.
On May 9, 2026, President Trump showed up at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, to take in the Maaden LIV Golf Virginia tournament. One week earlier, he was at Trump National Doral in Miami for the PGA Tour’s Cadillac Championship. In both cases, the tournaments were played on courses his family owns and profits from. And in both cases, nobody in the White House seemed interested in explaining exactly how much money was flowing into the Trump Organization’s pockets.
The result? A growing chorus of ethics experts, legal scholars, and critics who say the 79-year-old president is blending his business interests with his presidency in a way that’s impossible to ignore.
The Virginia LIV Golf Event That Set Off Alarms
The Maaden LIV Golf Virginia tournament ran May 7 through 10 at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, an 800-acre property along the Potomac River that Trump bought in 2009. The field was stacked: 14 major champions with a combined 28 major titles, including names like Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson, Brooks Koepka, and Cameron Smith.
Trump attended the event with his son Eric, who serves as executive vice president of the Trump Organization. Eric was openly enthusiastic about the event, saying he was “thrilled to welcome LIV Golf back” to the club. The tournament featured a fan village with a petting zoo, Lego builds, and a Saturday night concert by country singer Bailey Zimmerman. It all looked very family friendly. Very normal. Very Mother’s Day weekend.
But here’s the thing people kept coming back to: the tournament’s title sponsor, Maaden, is a Saudi Arabian state-owned mining company. LIV Golf itself is funded primarily by Saudi Arabia’s government. So a sitting U.S. president was watching a Saudi-backed golf league play on his own property, with Saudi state money sponsoring the whole thing. That’s the part that’s hard to shrug off.
Ethics Experts Are Not Amused
Multiple legal and ethics scholars have weighed in, and none of them are buying the White House’s line that everything is fine. Richard Painter, a professor of corporate law at the University of Minnesota Law School, told reporters that the golf tournaments are “just going to be the tip of the iceberg.” His bigger concern is the signal Trump is sending to foreign governments and wealthy interests around the world.
“The message has been said all over the world that if you want to get along with the Trump administration, do business with the Trump family or with his golf courses or with his son,” Painter said.
Kathleen Clark, a law professor specializing in government ethics at Washington University in St. Louis, was even more direct. She called Saudi Arabia a “murderous, authoritarian, anti-democratic region” and said Trump’s willingness to do business with the Saudi government through ventures like LIV Golf amounts to “sportswashing.” She called it “a really nice example about what his priorities are.”
Don Heider, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, turned his frustration toward Congress. “Where are the ethics of all the members of the Senate and the House?” he asked. “Why are they so afraid of political pressure they won’t speak up and tell the truth consistently and hold this president accountable?”
The White House Response: Nothing to See Here
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly offered a brief statement: “President Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children. There are no conflicts of interest.”
That’s it. That’s the whole response. The Trump Organization didn’t respond to requests for comment. Neither did the PGA Tour. Neither did LIV Golf.
The trust arrangement Kelly referenced puts Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. in charge of managing the family business while their father serves as president. Trump has said he won’t be involved in running the business during his time in office. But the experts point out that the trust isn’t a blind trust. Trump knows exactly what he owns, and his sons are managing it right in front of him. Eric was literally sitting next to him at the LIV event in Virginia.
The Doral Disaster the Week Before
If the Virginia weekend was the second shoe dropping, the first shoe was already causing problems. The PGA Tour’s Cadillac Championship returned to Trump National Doral’s iconic Blue Monster course for the first time since 2016, carrying a massive $20 million purse with $3.6 million going to the winner and 700 FedEx Cup points on the line.
It should have been a big deal. Instead, the galleries were thin, the bleachers were empty, and VIP tents looked like ghost towns.
Several things went wrong at once. The Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix ran the same weekend and pulled roughly 275,000 spectators, sucking up a lot of the local sports crowd. Big names like Rory McIlroy, Xander Schauffele, Matt Fitzpatrick, Ludvig Åberg, and Patrick Cantlay skipped the event. And then there was the security situation.
Because the president planned to attend the final round, the Secret Service set up TSA-style screening at multiple entry points. The tournament warned fans that travel times could “significantly increase” and told them to arrive earlier than planned. That kind of announcement tends to keep people home. And it did.
Trump arrived on Sunday afternoon, reaching the “Trump Suite” around 12:15 p.m. with family members including his granddaughter Kai Trump and daughter-in-law Vanessa Trump. Cameron Young won the tournament. But the story wasn’t really about golf anymore.
Players Couldn’t Even Get Into Their Own Clubhouse
The problems at Doral weren’t limited to fan attendance. Secret Service agents reportedly blocked PGA Tour players from entering their own clubhouse. Think about that for a second. Professional golfers, competing in a tournament at a course that invited them to play, couldn’t walk into the building because the president’s security detail wouldn’t let them.
Some fans took to social media saying “Trump ruins everything.” Others joked that he’d “show up Sunday to steal the trophy from the winner.” Whether or not you think those reactions were fair, the optics of a sitting president’s security detail disrupting a professional sporting event at his own property are, at minimum, awkward.
One observer noted that asking PGA Tour loyalists to fill the stands at a Trump property, after years of the bitter PGA-LIV rivalry that Trump openly fueled, “was always going to be a difficult ask.”
The Bigger Picture: Golf Is Just One Piece
Critics point out that the golf situation doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Trump has accepted a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar. He’s dined with wealthy investors in his cryptocurrency coin. He’s sold a Trump-branded smartphone. He’s promoted his Scotland golf properties while in office. Each one of these things, on its own, would raise eyebrows. Together, they paint a picture of a presidency where the line between public service and private profit has been erased entirely.
And the golf calendar isn’t done. Trump’s club in Bedminster, New Jersey, is scheduled to host another LIV Golf event in early August 2026. Ethics experts expect the same questions to come right back around when that happens.
The PGA Tour’s Uncomfortable Position
The PGA Tour itself is in a strange spot. It brought the Cadillac Championship back to Doral after a decade-long absence, ending a freeze that started when Trump’s political brand made it hard for the tour to find sponsors willing to be associated with his properties. PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp called Doral “a legacy venue on our schedule.”
Kevin Van Valkenburg, director of content at Fried Egg Golf, summed up the tour’s thinking pretty clearly: “The PGA Tour executives are fairly savvy. So they’re going to read the tea leaves and say, this person is a powerful, influential person in the world of golf. Maybe we’re better off making nice with him.”
Meanwhile, LIV Golf appears to be on shaky ground. The Saudi Public Investment Fund announced it would stop funding the league after the 2026 season. Trump, speaking from the Oval Office, backed reunification of the two tours: “I want to see Rory McIlroy playing Bryson DeChambeau. I want to see big Jon Rahm play Scottie Scheffler.” He added, “Now they’ll all be accepted by the tour. They’ll all be back on tour and it’ll be great.”
So the president who hosted LIV events at his properties and publicly supported the Saudi-backed league is now positioning himself as the guy who’ll bring golf back together. Whether that’s statesmanship or just another business play depends entirely on who you ask.
Why This Isn’t Going Away
The core issue is simple: there is almost no transparency around how much money the Trump family is making from these events. The trust that holds Trump’s assets isn’t blind. His sons run it. His properties host the tournaments. Saudi state entities sponsor them. And nobody in the White House will say how much any of this is worth.
Two consecutive weekends of professional golf at Trump-owned courses, with the president himself in attendance at both, makes the conflict of interest question almost impossible to avoid. You can argue the merits all day. You can point out that the events were already scheduled, that golf tournaments bring jobs and tourism, that Trump has every right to attend events at properties he owns. All of those things may be true.
But when a sitting president is watching a Saudi-sponsored golf league play on his own land, while his sons manage the family business that collects the checks, and the White House response is basically “trust us, there’s no problem,” a lot of people are going to have follow-up questions. And right now, nobody’s answering them.