President Donald Trump is back in Florida this weekend, but he made a stop off first before heading to his Mar-a-Lago club and resort. Instead, he was at another of his properties to host a professional golf tournament.
Trump arrived Thursday at his Trump National Doral Resort, a half-hour outside of Miami, for the 2025 LIV Golf Miami tournament. The resort has hosted an event on the LIV Golf schedule since the 2022 season, when an eight-event Invitational Series was played as a proof of concept. Trump Doral hosted the $50 million LIV Golf team championship in 2022 and 2023 before hosting a regular-season individual-first event in 2024 for the concept now called the LIV Golf League, which is overwhelmingly owned by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia.
Trump properties have hosted other LIV Golf events, including at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and Trump National Golf Club in northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C.
The Doral resort will host the 54-player tournament, played Friday through Sunday, on the famed Blue Monster Course, which was redesigned by architect Gil Hanse in 2013. Trump bought the resort back in 2012 at a relative bargain price.
Trump has been engaged in the ongoing conversations between LIV Golf's ownership, the PGA Tour and the London-based DP World Tour about a potential investment and merger of interests that would seek to reunify men's professional golf after four years. Trump has hosted representatives from the PGA Tour and the Public Investment Fund at The White House to talk through sticking points in a potential deal.
Reportedly, the PGA Tour rejected a Saudi offer to inject $1.5 billion into the Florida-based organization because the Saudis insisted that LIV Golf continue to exist as a separate entity. So far, the Saudis have invested a reported $5 billion in the LIV Golf concept, including purses, putting on tournaments and signing players, including lavish signing bonuses to lure those golfers from the PGA Tour and DP World Tour. Several of those star players, including Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka, will see their contracts end and may or may not return to the circuit with a new contract. Koepka said this week that he thought LIV Golf's business development would be further along in Year 4 than it currently is. LIV Golf is airing on Fox Sports in 2025 in the first year of a multi-year, cross-platform deal.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on the way to Doral, Trump said he would like to see the two professional tours merge.
“Ultimately, hopefully, the two tours are going to merge. That’ll be good. I’m involved in that too,” Trump told said, according to the Associated Press. “But hopefully we’re going to get the two tours to merge. You have the PGA Tour and the LIV Tour. And I think having them merge would be a great thing.”
The golf tournament unfolds as the world reacts to the tariffs that Trump announced earlier this week in Washington. The reaction has sent the stock market reeling, while China has announced their own tariffs on American goods in response.
