Years ago, my father and a friend of the family used to golf together with a regular playing crew. They played for money (skins) and for placement (tourneys) regularly and took it very seriously.
This friend of the family was an incorrigible liar. He was known to embellish literally everything. If someone had made progress on a project, HE had finished a bigger project that week. If someone else was promoted and celebrating with a toast, HE was promoted to a higher position just recently and weaseled in on the toast for himself. In other words, he was the absolute blue print for malignant narcissism and if you had met him, you would today believe he was copying Donald Trump in every way possible. He cheated at golf too. Which is where the story really begins...
This group of players signed up to play in a semi-pro regional tournament (Moose Lodge sponsored regional championship for Northern Indiana). In these settings, ESPECIALLY amongst serious golfers, cheating is unimaginable and offensive. It is seen a kin to walking up to a priest and spitting in their face during Mass or worse. These men play on their honor and that MEANS something to them all. During this match, this man was observed shaving strokes during the round by the opponents. When he went to turn in his scorecard, his card came up missing but he reported a fabricated score. My dad's playing partner was on top of it though. He ALWAYS keep score for his entire playing group and was in the foursome on the course that day.
The confrontation started with the opposing team demanding to see his scorecard, which was all of a sudden "lost" and claimed to have been turned into the marshal previously. This was of course bullshit, but the ruse was to report a lowered score and then count on a lack of evidence to challenge it (a REALLY dumb plan, but that was the gist of it). When word came to dad's playing partner, he offered his card as testimony of the scoring that round. It was off by 6 shots. That's a stunning level of dishonesty in competitive golf - shaving one stroke per round is unforgivable, but one every 3 holes??? That is just unheard of.
This almost came to throwing hands when the confrontation was made to the tournament officials and my dad and his entire side (I believe they had 6 men to a side in this event) was DQ'd for filing a false scorecard. That shame is attached to the entire TEAM at that point, not just the cheater, but everyone. The words said are not fit for public disclosure, but suffice it to say there was no ambiguity of what these men thought of the cheater and where he should place his clubs, and it was NOT in his bag!
After this, a shameful and very public episode, this man had the absolute gall to show up again the next month to play in a scramble with the same team members he had tarnished. When he walked up to the scorer's table to register, the man who had confirmed his cheating walked up to him and said something to effect of "I cannot believe you have the gall...we can't even shame you into not showing up?" The entire team that had been shamed by his actions refused to play with him after that, but he kept showing up and playing in solo events nonetheless, acting as if nothing had happened.
These last 10 years I have remembered this story far more frequently than I wish. Trump is this man writ large. A habitual liar, incapable of facing uncomfortable truths. A hateful bigot, who claims to be anything of the sort. A vainglorious braggart who needs to always one-up everyone that makes him look small by comparison. And worst of all, an oblivious fool who believes that like Peter Pan, if he just wishes for it hard enough, it will be true no matter what reality shows.
I have the unpleasant experience of having lived our country's nightmare (at least from 2015 to the present) more than once. The people who do these things are irredeemable and will never recognize their faults. The only solace of this comes from knowledge that A) when they die, they do so in a state of earned shame, and B) that earned shame tends to stick and stay with them into eternity. We cannot shame them into not continuing their ill behavior, but we can take a measure of solace in their ultimate fate.
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