Tickets for the controversial Saudi-sponsored event at Donald Trump’s New Jersey golf course had been reportedly going for as little as $1, and crowds had been scant — however Trump and his followers tried their greatest to remodel the tourney right into a mini marketing campaign occasion on Saturday.
Spectators sporting shirts bearing pro-Trump slogans within the grandstand behind the primary tee erupted into chants of “Four more years!” when the previous president emerged in a crimson “Make America Great Again” cap for the second day of the foreign-funded event at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster.
Later, Trump was seen elevating a fist on the sixteenth tee watching the motion alongside Christian nationalist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who got here to the occasion to applaud the Saudi event — and MAGA fanatics.
Trump fan Dave Teed, an area firefighter who got here to the occasion, advised Golfweek that he “can deal with” the Saudi Arabia “thing,” nevertheless it it was “China or something like that, no way. I wouldn’t be here.”
As for the precise event, the Washington Post scoffed that it had had thin crowds, big talk and loud music blasting from audio system throughout the course, “even as players lined up tricky putts.”
Trump has giddily hailed the brand new LIV event, financed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, to compete with America’s personal PGA event. The “America First” former president has known as the Saudi tourney a “gold rush” that golfers ought to benefit from.
But critics have bashed the LIV tournaments as “sport washing” by a brutal regime searching for to cleanse its fame after the dismemberment-murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and its hyperlinks to the 9/11 terror assaults.
Families of the victims of 9/11 and survivors had known as on Trump to refuse to carry the event.
In an offended gathering in downtown Bedminister on Friday, Juliette Scauso, whose firefighter dad Dennis Scauso died within the 9/11 assaults, addressed Trump, asking: “How much money does it take to turn your back on your country, on the American people?”
In response to criticism, Trump on Thursday ripped the “maniacs who did that horrible thing” of the 9/11 terror assaults— however insisted that “nobody’s gotten to the bottom of 9/11.”
He additionally insisted to the Wall Street Journal earlier within the week that the backlash over the brutal killing of Khashoggi had “died down.” American intelligence decided that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, chairman of the fund financing the event, ordered the dissident’s 2018 homicide.
Though the Saudi authorities has denied any accountability for the 9/11 terror assaults, 15 of the 19 al-Qaeda terrorists who carried out the assaults had been from Saudi Arabia. After an intensive investigation, the FBI additionally detailed a number of contacts and phone calls between Saudi officials and the terrorists.
The 9/11 Families United group stated said in a statement on the time that the report implicated “numerous Saudi government officials in a coordinated effort to mobilize an essential support network for the first arriving 9/11 hijackers.”
Trump himself in 2016 repeatedly pointed to the Saudis as possible culprits in 9/11.
