Welcome to the Trump Open at Doonbeg, where everyone is busy making their own accommodations for the impending guest of (dis)honour.
Tournament sponsor Emirates, for instance, handed the amateurs playing on their pro-am teams black baseball caps rather than the company’s traditional red caps. The red baseball cap is evidently one man’s copyright this week.
The State’s provisions are altogether less subtle, footing a reported security bill of €20 million across the entirety of Trump’s visit. Even the golfers, usually so exquisitely ignorant of life outside the ropeline, may have to pause their third rounds to allow Trump’s Marine One helicopter land on the property.
“Logistically, it provides some challenges, absolutely. But at the same time, if he wants to come and watch the Irish Open, who are we to say no?” said Rory McIlroy about Trump from atop a diplomatic tightrope.
Rory McIlroy says Donald Trump’s presence at Irish Open ‘can only be a good thing’
And certainly, if the owner of the property on which the Irish Open is being staged says he wants to attend the tournament, then it’s not feasible to tell him he isn’t welcome.
The alternative, however, was not to stage the event in Doonbeg in the first place.
We hold this truth to be self-evident: the Trump Organisation’s investment in and operation of the hotel and golf course has been a wonder for Doonbeg. It has defibrillated the local economy and has given Doonbeg a path away from the lousy decline into which so many rural Irish players have been allowed to slide. The locals have been accused of selling their souls, but there are grey-templed men and women sitting in muted rural pubs across the country with their own viewpoint. Those men and women lament Ireland’s failure to value the loyal and obedient soul of their locality.
Inside the Doonbeg bubble where the locals and Trump have reached a deal of mutual benefit
Trump’s golf course and hotel is a huge source of full-time employment and, crucially, casual employment too: money in the pockets of young people makes every city, town, or village in Ireland more vivid. The golf course doesn’t sit as some kind of haughty enclave from the locality either, as it hosts the GAA golf classic and offers a respectable level of course access for locals.
But equally, business was going sufficiently well in Doonbeg before the State put its weight behind the push to move the national open to Trump’s property. This is a gratuitous, needless decision that has transmuted the event into another offering to lay before the American president in obsequious flattery.
It is, of course, in Ireland’s economic interest to keep Trump onside, propped up as we are by the tax receipts of American multinational companies. This tournament offers a snapshot of our national precarity in that its title sponsor is Amgen, an American biotechnology company and thus one of the firms Trump has made occasional soundings about repatriating for the benefit of his economy.
Still, everything in moderation. Hosting the Irish Open in Doonbeg goes beyond massaging Trump’s ego or the State doing its bit for the local economy. Firstly, it is done in the name of the whole country, rather than the Doonbeg residents who rely on the venue for jobs and income. Secondly, it strays much further into the realm of colluding with one of the most corrosive aspects of his presidency: his leveraging the office for immense personal wealth.
Returning to the White House has made Trump a very rich man. He declared total earnings for 2025 of $2.2 billion (€1.9 billion), the majority of which came from cryptocurrency earnings. His golf business, however, is booming, raking in $392 million last year, a 12.5 percent increase on the year before. Doonbeg ranked 10th of 14 golf courses in the revenue stakes, returning $16.1 million. (Doral, host of a PGA Tour event this year which Trump attended, is by some distance the most lucrative at $121 million.)
Doonbeg’s hosting of the Irish Open is a phenomenal marketing opportunity for the course, beamed as it will be into American homes with a constellation of star names and no other men’s golf tournament jostling with it for attention. Trump’s presence brings further coverage by making the event impossible to ignore. The coverage will ultimately align Doonbeg as another of the great Irish links courses in the minds of prospective tourists, and so it will be added to a great number of bucket lists for those with the financial means to fly to Ireland and tick them all off.
We will hear across this week’s visit that various Irish political leaders don’t necessarily agree with Trump’s politics, but his politics are driven entirely out of self-interest and there is nothing that interests him more than making money. And all of this – the exchequer costs, the road closures, the cancelled Garda leave, the lengthier queues, the tension in the air, the daunting, alienating sight of armed guards and secret service – is all ultimately to the end of making the Trump Organisation a few extra quid.