This isn’t really a post about golf. You are reading Daily Kos, after all. But a golfer does feature prominently, because he has long been a figure of interest for right-wing, race-baiting demagogues like President Individual 1, along with the guy who still—yes, still—has the largest audience of any radio talk show host: Rush Limbaugh.
As for that golfer, namely Tiger Woods, I doubt many of you predicted a few months ago that he’d receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom anytime soon (I didn’t either, believe me). But sure enough, he got one last month from The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote. In fact, the announcement came just one day after Tiger’s amazing comeback culminated in a victory at the Masters. Who needs a selection process that typically unfolds over a number of months and involves careful consideration before awarding such a prestigious medal? Not President Instant Gratification, apparently.
I’ve already mentioned one thing Trump and Limbaugh have in common. Another is golf. You might be interested to know that Trump’s golf outings have cost taxpayers approximately $102 million so far. That’s only about $12 million less than the cost of all the Obama family’s travel—i.e., not just golf-related expenses incurred by the president—during eight years in the White House.
Limbaugh and Trump not only both love golf, they’ve even played together. How nice. Trump and Tiger have also played together, and after their round in early February, the former actually predicted that Woods would win another major. If Trump wants to give up his current position and become a full-time golf analyst, I’ll be the first one to applaud. By the way, Tiger also played golf with Barack Obama, but we’ll get back to that combination a bit later.
When Tiger won the Masters, Limbaugh talked about all he had overcome, including the sex and infidelity scandals in the golfer’s past, and then spoke quite positively about him: “One of the things I’ve admired about Tiger Woods is he’s shown the way how to be a friend, how to remove politics from his public comments.” Then Limbaugh continued that praise as he shifted the topic to politics:
You know, he and Donald Trump have been friends for years. People have been pressuring — you don’t know this — pressuring Tiger Woods ever since Trump got in the race to denounce Donald Trump just like they pressed Tom Brady to denounce Donald Trump. And just like they pressed the owner of the Patriots, Robert Kraft, to trounce and criticize Trump. And they wouldn’t do it, and Tiger wouldn’t do it. Tiger didn’t ditch Trump when it would have been easy to ditch him.
Tiger could have said, “You know, it might speed my public approval along. It might help me get more appreciated if I publicly come out and ditch Trump.” But he didn’t do it. It would have been so easy. Just join the chorus that Trump is a skunk, that Trump is this or that. But Tiger didn’t do it. All Tiger Woods did was keep his head down and avoid being in the news over politics.
On a side note, Limbaugh also couldn’t resist throwing in a little of his trademark shtick on how there’s no racism in America because X: “I can’t tell you the number of people who sent me texts, “Hey, hey, how can that happen in such a racist country? See all those white people cheering Tiger Woods?” Exactly my point, folks. We’re not a racist country.” Right. And just because there’s a really cold day in January means there’s no climate crisis (or, in Trump’s formulation, no “Global Waming”).
After Tiger accepted the medal from Trump during a May 6 ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, Limbaugh had more to say on the following day’s show. He heaped kind words upon Woods, and then attacked the media, which he said had “hammered Tiger Woods for years.” Limbaugh defended Tiger against those who had criticized him for accepting the award from Trump, whom the host described as falsely accused of fomenting racism. Limbaugh then spewed some Trump party-line bunk: “Trump is not anti-immigrant, and he isn’t racist. Donald Trump has done more for African-Americans in terms of economic opportunity than any Democrat president ever has and ever will, for that matter.” Who’s the real racist, according to Limbaugh? I think you all know the answer to that one:
Let me tell you something. The racial divide in this country is owing to Barack Hussein Obama. It was predicted and it happened. The racial divide in this country precedes Donald Trump.
So, in sum: Tiger’s a great guy, he’s overcome a lot, the media hates him, and Obama’s a racist. End of story. Except that’s not the whole story when it comes to what Limbaugh has said over the years about Tiger Woods and President Obama. First of all, remember Limbaugh’s remark about the media figures who “hammered Tiger Woods for years”? Well, he was one of them.
Furthermore, Limbaugh did so specifically by connecting Woods to Obama in a highly racialized and sexualized manner. That connection was one of the few things that really surprised me as I was doing the research (I read eight years of Rush Limbaugh Show transcripts) for my new book The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump. What follows is an excerpt from the book:
On the matter of depicting the president as being not what he appeared to be—or, as Limbaugh put it on December 8, 2009, “the man behind the curtain . . . the real Barack Obama,”—the host suggested parallels with another public figure with whom Obama seemed, on the surface, to share something when it came to matters of race: Tiger Woods. Both had black fathers (although Woods’s has some white ancestry while Obama’s was a dark-skinned African) and non-black mothers (Obama’s was white, while Woods’s was of Thai, Chinese, and Dutch origin). The two men have talked, albeit using different terms, about moving beyond traditional, absolutist ways of understanding racial identity. Seemingly a lifetime ago, Woods referred to his racial identity as “Cablinasian,” a combination of the words Caucasian, black, American Indian, and Asian.
On the same December 8, 2009 show, which was just days after Woods’s infidelity became a major media story, Limbaugh approvingly brought up an article by conservative writer Lisa Schiffren (who also authored the 1992 speech inwhich Vice President Dan Quayle criticized TV’s “Murphy Brown” for glorifying single motherhood): “If I were watching the public’s disgust with the newly revealed Tiger Woods from an office in the West Wing, I’d be concerned.” Why? Because, as Limbaugh’s audience heard, Obama’s campaign “explicitly attempt[ed] to borrow from the then-universal Tiger Woods appeal to allay any discomfort voters might have had with a mixed-race politician. They constructed a persona that would make the American electorate comfortable with a barely-known, first-term senator with a left-wing voting record, a deliberately obscured personal and professional past, and no traditional qualifications for high office.”
The host then added that, “just as there were people who knew the real Tiger, there are people who know the real Barack Obama.” Two days later, another quick mention hinted at Woods’s cheating on his wife by having sex with white women: “So Obama goes over there and, you know, there aren’t a whole lot of African-Americans on the Nobel Peace Committee, there aren’t a whole lot of African-Americans in Denmark, Norway over there, a lot of blondes, Tiger Woods would know about it.”
Limbaugh went back to the Woods–Obama connection ten days later, on December 18, 2009. This segment offered a prototypical example of Limbaugh insinuating something truly obscene but giving himself just enough cover to say that he did not actually say it. “The parallels between Barack Obama and Tiger Woods are stunning,” Limbaugh began “We don’t know if there’s rampant sex romps going on with Obama. We doubt that. But everything else . . . .We don’t know who he is. We don’t know anything about the man other than his years agitating the community in Chicago, the things he’s written about in his books.” According to Limbaugh, Obama had secrets, and was definitely a shady character of some sort. More specifically, Obama was like Woods, another multiracial, light-skinned black guy, and if Tiger was having affairs with white women, well . . . . While Limbaugh did say, “We doubt that” in order to give himself cover, by simply teasing the possibility he was encouraging his listeners to wonder whether Obama—just like Woods—might well be having “sex romps” with white women.
Limbaugh here was evoking one of the most dangerous, hateful racist tropes in the history of our country: the sexually aggressive black man who pursues white women. The fear and rage that this trope unleashed resulted in the lynching of thousands of black men accused, in some cases, of doing little more than looking a bit too long at a white woman. The brutal 1955 murder of Emmett Till falls into this category. His funeral—with its open casket that put the violence of white supremacy on full display—shocked the nation. It is hard to believe that Limbaugh did not know exactly what he was doing.
The host continued to use the theme of the sexually aggressive black man frequently when mentioning Obama and Woods. On February 19, 2010, Limbaugh stated that, “Now, Fox was running this, but Obama’s been broomed for Tiger’s porn star mistress. I dig it.” “Broomed” means abandoned, so this was ostensibly aboutFox News moving from covering the president to another topic, but Limbaugh saw an opportunity to mention Joslyn James, the white porn star mistress of Tiger Woods, and Obama in the same sentence.
Similarly, on February 18, 2013, the host talked at length about the president having had a private—i.e., no press allowed—golf outing in Florida with Woods the day before. Limbaugh joked about having been on a Florida highway and seeing “a busload of women” travelling in the general direction of the course the two were playing on, before covering himself by adding, “I’m not leveling any accusations.” After a break, Limbaugh said he’d received a number of emails saying, in summary, “‘Rush, come on! Obama’s a very loyal and devoted husband. He doesn’t care about women.’ Maybe not, but who else was up there?”
Then the host replayed the Obama–Woods “sex romps” segment and concluded with: “At some point the same unmasking that has happened to Tiger Woods will happen to Barack Obama.” Limbaugh went on: “I predicted that, at some point, the veil would be lifted on Obama. I still say this. I thought it would happen by now, but it hasn’t yet. But it has been on Tiger . . . . When the media makes you, the media can break you—and that is going to be true of Obama at some point.”
After that point, Limbaugh stopped bringing up Tiger Woods as a way to engage in race-baiting about President Obama. That particular theme had run its course, and, besides that, he had plenty of other tools in his racist bag of tricks.
On the one hand, Limbaugh showed that he was willing to use disgusting language about Woods to stir up racial hate and fear of a black president of the United States, On the other hand, he’s perfectly willing to turn 180 degrees when there’s a new president who embraces the once-again golf champion. Today, the host has nothing but positive things to say about Tiger.
This reversal, this utter hypocrisy, should surprise no one. Limbaugh now sees Woods as a fellow member of Team Trump, or at least as someone he can use to further prop Trump up—a key element of which is undercutting the truth about racism in America.