If you’ve ever been to the golf section in a sporting goods store and taken a whirl on the golf simulator—in which you just whack a golf ball into a virtual screen six feet in front of you—you’ve probably wondered what kind of asshole would actually pay to have one installed in their house. Well, today you have your answer: Donald Trump is that kind of asshole.
Here’s the scoop, from the Washington Post:
President Trump has installed a room-sized “golf simulator” game at the White House, which allows him to play virtual rounds at courses all over the world by hitting a ball into a large video screen, according to two people told about the system.
That system replaced an older, less sophisticated golf simulator that had been installed under President Obama, according to two people with knowledge of the previous system.
Trump’s system cost about $50,000, and was put in during the last few weeks in a room in his personal quarters, a White House official said.
Please resist the urge to mewl about how Obama had a simulator too or to begin thinking about how this news affects the Who Presidented Harder? scoreboard that every DC hack pulls out whenever a president steps on a golf course. I ask you instead to think about how unbelievably corny this is. $50,000! On a golf simulator! A piece of entertainment technology so bland and retrograde that no American teenager would be able to spend more than four minutes using one before begging to be taken home so they can go back to playing Fortnite.
Imagine Donald Trump waking up, eating whatever horrible meal it is he eats, watching Fox & Friends, sending a few tweets, losing a few hours of consciousness to a spasm of dementia, and then rolling himself into his heinously expensive golf simulator to whittle away at his hours of daily “executive time.” He’s just in there, thwack, thwack, thwacking the ball into the dumb screen, delighted by the sounds and noises. It’s hard to imagine a more harrowing scene.