Trump Mocks Biden’s Golf as Cancer Battle Worsens
Donald Trump revived his long-running golf rivalry with Joe Biden in a Truth Social jab days after Biden’s family described the former president’s metastatic cancer as painful and debilitating.
Donald Trump has revived one of his most personal running taunts against Joe Biden — this time while the former president is living with metastatic prostate cancer that his family says has become painful and debilitating.
In a Truth Social post dated Aug. 7, Trump shared a photograph of Biden playing golf and wrote, “Biden isn’t even a 100 Handicap.” The line was brief, but the target was familiar. Trump has spent years turning golf into a shorthand argument about strength, age and competence, especially when talking about Biden.
What is different now is the context around the man in the photograph.
Biden, 83, was diagnosed in May 2025 with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. His office said at the time that the cancer carried a Gleason score of 9, placing it among the more aggressive forms of the disease, while also noting that it was hormone-sensitive and therefore susceptible to treatment.
This month, Hunter Biden offered a more personal picture of his father’s condition. He said the cancer had caused significant pain and had become debilitating, even as the former president continued to make public appearances and work on a memoir.
Trump’s post did not mention cancer. It did not make a medical claim. The mockery was aimed at Biden’s golf game. But separating the insult from Biden’s current condition is difficult because the health crisis is now part of the public reality surrounding the former president.
The two men have been arguing about golf for years. During the June 2024 presidential debate, a question about age and fitness veered into a surreal dispute over handicaps. Trump boasted about club championships and said Biden could not hit a ball 50 yards. Biden countered that he had once lowered his handicap to six and challenged Trump to carry his own bag. Golf records cited at the time listed Biden at 6.7 during his vice-presidential years, although the figure had not been recently updated.
That exchange became one of the strangest moments of the 2024 campaign. It was funny to some viewers because two elderly presidential candidates were measuring physical vigor through a country-club sport. Yet it was never really about golf. Each man was trying to tell voters that the other was too weak, too old or too detached from reality to lead.
Trump has kept the golf mythology alive in his second term. He regularly publicizes victories at tournaments played at his own clubs and this month again celebrated a championship at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster. His skill, scores and claims have long attracted scrutiny, but the game remains central to the image he projects: competitive, tireless and unwilling to concede a point, even in leisure.
Biden’s relationship with the sport has become something else. The old debate clip now belongs to a period before his cancer diagnosis, before his withdrawal from the 2024 race and before the latest descriptions from his family about the physical toll of the disease.
That makes the timing of Trump’s new post notable. When Biden’s diagnosis was announced in May 2025, Trump initially struck a very different tone. He said he and Melania were saddened by the news and wished Biden a fast and successful recovery. The political attacks soon returned, including unsupported claims about when Biden’s cancer had been discovered, but the first public response recognized a boundary that American politicians have often observed when a rival becomes seriously ill.
The Aug. 7 golf post tests that boundary again without crossing it explicitly. Trump did not ridicule cancer. He ridiculed a sick political opponent’s athletic ability while Biden’s family was publicly describing the pain of metastatic disease.
That distinction may satisfy partisans who see political combat as permanent and personal. It will not erase the ugliness of the image for readers who see illness as one of the few conditions that should put ordinary taunting on hold.
There is also a broader political habit at work. Trump’s attacks often reduce opponents to physical caricatures: sleepy, weak, low-energy, overweight, confused, unable to walk, unable to play. The language is designed to make policy disagreements feel like contests of dominance. Golf is unusually useful for that purpose because Trump can cast himself simultaneously as athlete, winner and judge of everyone else’s performance.
Biden is no longer running against him. He is no longer president. His golf handicap has no bearing on a government decision. Yet the old rivalry remains available for reuse because it requires almost no explanation to Trump’s audience. One photograph and one sentence are enough to restart a familiar story.
The story now carries a different weight. Biden’s next months will be shaped not by a rematch on a golf course but by treatment, pain management and the demands of living publicly with metastatic cancer. Trump, meanwhile, shows no sign of retiring the personal scorecard he has kept on his predecessor. The next round of their rivalry may still be rhetorical, but one of the men is now fighting a contest far more serious than golf.
