What Trump could learn from a former president who golfed too much

In his first 88 days in office, US President Donald Trump went golfing 14 times - an average of once every 6.3 days. At that rate, he’ll end up golfing far more frequently than Barack Obama, who golfed once every 9.5 days and whom Trump often criticised for spending too much time on the links.

Golf is always a risky undertaking for a president. Trump might want to consider the case of the first golfing president: William Howard Taft, with whom Trump shares some striking similarities.

By his own admission, Taft was “addicted to golf”. He played so often during the 1908 presidential campaign that his predecessor and political mentor, Theodore Roosevelt, urged him to give up the game. Roosevelt, who despised golf, told Taft he had received “literally hundreds of letters” from people complaining about Taft playing a “rich man’s game.”

But Taft was unrepentant and disputed the notion that golf was a rich man’s pursuit, writing: “I know that there is nothing more democratic than golf; that there is nothing which furnishes a greater test of character and self-restraint, nothing which puts one more on an equality with one’s fellows, or, I may say, puts one lower than one’s fellows, than the game of golf.”

Taft was a bad golfer - he rarely broke 100 - but his love of the game was absolute. He called it a “splendid form of exercise.” Taft, who was famously obese, credited the game for putting him in the “splendid physical condition” necessary for “the strenuous work of the campaign.”