POTUS and Gary Player Motorcade Rolls Through LIV Golf

August 10, 2026

The modern American presidency now runs, on any given weekend, through the fairways of courses that carry the president’s own name — and Bedminster’s LIV Golf New York stop is the clearest illustration yet of how thoroughly golf, business, and executive power have folded into one another.

Key Points

President Trump attended the LIV Golf New York tournament at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in August 2026, with his motorcade spotted near the clubhouse and Trump later driving a golf cart past cheering spectators.
A White House official confirmed the president’s attendance in advance, and multiple outlets independently documented his presence on-site for the tournament’s third round.
Social media posts additionally placed golf legend Gary Player in the presidential motorcade at the event, a detail that has not yet been independently corroborated by mainstream reporting.
Bedminster marks at least the third Trump-branded golf property to host LIV Golf while Trump has occupied the Oval Office, following stops at Doral in Florida and Trump National Washington D.C. in Sterling, Virginia.
The pattern raises a durable and legitimate question — separate from any single day’s footage — about the overlap between the presidency and a golf business that profits directly from hosting a Saudi-backed tour.

What Actually Happened at Bedminster

The basic sequence is well established and drawn from independent, on-the-record reporting rather than a single clip. USA Today reported days before the tournament that a White House official had confirmed the president’s plan to attend LIV Golf New York, though the exact dates of his appearance weren’t specified in advance. The event itself was scheduled for August 6-9, 2026, at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey, per the tour’s own event listing. When Trump did arrive, the New York Post reported his motorcade was spotted near the clubhouse shortly after 10:30 a.m. during the third round, and that he later drove a golf cart past spectators who cheered him along the course.

None of that is in serious dispute. It fits a template Trump has followed repeatedly since LIV Golf began holding events on his properties in 2022: arrive by motorcade, tour the grounds by cart, work the gallery, leave to cheers. The Guardian documented an early version of this ritual at the same Bedminster course in 2022, when Trump toured the grounds with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the Saudi Public Investment Fund governor who bankrolls LIV, pausing for photos with VIP ticket holders as LCD Soundsystem played over the loudspeakers. The choreography hasn’t changed much in four years; what has changed is that the man driving the cart now also runs the executive branch.

The Motorcade and the Gary Player Question

Where the record gets thinner is on the specific claim that golf legend Gary Player rode in that motorcade. Grassroots social posts from the event, including on-the-ground accounts describing “President Trump and Gary Player at LIV Golf in Bedminster,” placed the two men together in the convoy that day. That is plausible on its face — Player has longstanding ties to professional golf’s Saudi-financed era and has appeared at LIV functions before — but it is a claim resting on eyewitness social posts rather than on the wire-service and beat-reporter coverage that verified Trump’s own attendance. No pool report, credentialed photograph identification, or on-record LIV statement in the available coverage confirms Player’s presence in the vehicle itself, as distinct from his presence at the event generally.

That gap matters less than it might sound. Absence of formal confirmation on a granular detail — who exactly sat where in a golf cart or SUV — is not evidence that the detail is false; it simply means the claim hasn’t cleared the bar that the core attendance story already cleared through multiple independent outlets. Readers should treat the Trump-at-Bedminster fact as settled and the Player-in-the-motorcade detail as plausible but unverified by primary reporting, a distinction that matters to anyone assessing how much weight a single video clip or social post can bear on its own.

A Pattern, Not an Anomaly

Bedminster is not an isolated data point. Trump attended LIV’s inaugural 2025 domestic event at Trump National Doral in Miami, and later that year motorcaded to Trump National Golf Club Washington D.C. in Sterling, Virginia, to watch LIV action from a suite, calling on players to rejoin the PGA Tour as he arrived. That Sterling visit generated its own coverage of the sheer scale of presidential movement involved — one report described “the massive motorcade” ferrying him to the course just hours after he’d returned from a trip to China. Add Bedminster, and Trump has now attended LIV Golf events at three separate properties he owns while serving as president, each time with the same basic elements: Secret Service motorcade, a cart tour of the grounds, and a warm reception from a gallery that skews heavily toward supporters.

The repetition is the story as much as any single appearance. It signals that LIV Golf’s relationship with Trump-branded properties has become a semi-permanent fixture of the tour’s American calendar, and that presidential attendance at those events has become routine enough that advance confirmation from the White House — as happened before Bedminster — is now standard practice rather than a surprise disclosure.

President Trump and Gary Player at LIV Golf in Bedminster 🔥 pic.twitter.com/1G7ImkD2Vr

— YoungNJRepublicans (@ColbyMannionNJ) August 9, 2026

Why the Venue Itself Is the Real Issue

The more consequential question sitting underneath the cart-and-motorcade footage isn’t who Trump waved to or who rode alongside him — it’s that the tournament schedule of a foreign-financed golf league keeps landing on properties the sitting president personally owns and profits from. LIV Golf is bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and every dollar the tour pays a Trump-branded club for hosting rights, and every membership sold on the strength of presidential visibility, flows to a business the president retains a financial stake in. Critics have raised this directly in the public conversation around these events, arguing that a president spending tournament weekends at his own commercial properties blurs the line between official time and private enrichment — a criticism voiced repeatedly in commentary surrounding these visits, even as supporters frame the same visits as harmless recreation and a boost for American golf.

Both readings can be true at once. The attendance is real, well-documented, and, on the evidence available, unremarkable as spectacle — a popular president getting a warm reception at a golf tournament. But the structural arrangement that put a taxpayer-funded motorcade on a route to a privately owned, Saudi-tour-hosting clubhouse for the third time is not a one-day story; it’s a standing feature of this presidency that will keep recurring on LIV’s calendar as long as the tour keeps booking Trump properties and the president keeps showing up.