“Golf is like bicycle shorts, it reveals a lot about a man.” [1]

So, at least, claims Rick Reilly, an American sports journalist and golf-devotee who has played rounds with some of America’s top professional and celebrity players. In 1995, Reilly had perhaps the ultimate opportunity to put his golf-personality theory to the test, when he was asked to take part in a New York tournament as the playing partner of a brash and controversial real estate mogul by the name of Donald J. Trump. For Reilly, this was a chance not to be missed: A close-up view of Trump squeezed into his cycling shorts (metaphorically, of course) that would help him understand what really made the big man tick.

What then did Reilly learn about Trump’s inner world by studying his approach to golf? A great deal apparently, because he wrote an entire book about it. Drawing on his experiences, as well as those of other Trump golf partners he managed to interview, Reilly describes the man as a habitual rule-breaker, kicking bad shots back into play, re-taking poor tee shots and even tossing an opponent’s ball into a bunker. He reports a consistent pattern of lying about past victories and scores, and of failing to report poor rounds that would dent his handicap. In a sport that relies heavily on players’ honesty and integrity, Trump engineered an alternate reality in which he always came out on top.

What these antics seem to betray, Reilly concludes, is a worldview in which facts are “malleable and negotiable” and where the weight of truth can be conjured from thin air with a few confidently spoken words. And as history records, the casual bending of reality Reilly witnessed on the golf course would later become a defining feature of Trump’s time as president. From odd but harmless tweets asserting that it did not rain during his inauguration ceremony to incendiary claims that he had won the election in 2020, the Trump years have felt to many like a prolonged episode of gaslighting.

Running for president

But if Trump’s idiosyncratic approach to golf helps us understand the unconventional nature of his presidency, the fact he played golf at all certainly does not. Golf has been the sport of choice for presidents for well over a century; all but four American leaders since 1897 have played the game.[3] So the mere fact that Trump enjoyed golf tells us little that distinguishes him from his predecessors, and even suggests a degree of conventionality that contradicts his maverick political brand. However, he also made another less widely noticed sporting choice that was much more unusual – and perhaps more revealing. For Donald Trump was the first US president since the 1980s who did not run.

Before Donald Trump, there was Barak Obama, who famously jogged around the White House with future president Joe Biden to promote a campaign to boost American’s activity levels. His predecessor, George W. Bush, went on regular 5km runs when in Washington but wanted more: “It’s sad that I can’t run longer. It’s one of the saddest things about the presidency.”[4] Before him there was Bill Clinton, whose three-times-a-week jogging habit was a security nightmare,[5] and George Bush senior, who used to chat with favoured journalists on his regular runs.[6] Ronald Reagan was not a runner – he portrayed himself as a rugged frontiersman who kept fit through “horseback riding and working outdoors” – but he did firmly advocate jogging for others.[7]

The first US president of the 1980s, Jimmy Carter, was an enthusiast however, even taking part in a 10k road race whilst in office.[8] And the modern phenomenon of jogging political leaders has not been limited to the United States. In Britain, Prime Ministers Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Boris Johnson were all conspicuous joggers, as was Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. Some of these men (notably, female leaders appear much less likely to go jogging – in public at least) were genuinely keen runners who were involved in the sport both before and after their time in office; others were mere joggers of convenience, happy to go for a performative trot around the block if they thought it offered a chance for some useful publicity.

The meaning of non-jogging

Either way, running to keep fit appears to be judged good PR by the White House and Number Ten press machines, with interviews organised and photo-ops scheduled to help draw attention to the top man’s more-or-less authentic obsession with the sport. And indeed, running has generally attracted positive media coverage, being interpreted as evidence of the energy and fitness needed to withstand the stresses and strains of high office; it speaks of discipline, self-control and an orderly life. The metronome feet of the political jogger have become a conventional sign for a safe pair of hands.

In this light, Trump’s nonjogging becomes interesting. Famously, unlike most politicians, his political brand is not built on being safe or disciplined like a jogger, but on being disruptive and reckless like a street fighter. Perhaps partaking in a regime of running would undermine this image, suggesting that the Great Strongman privately struggles with anxieties about his health or how he looks, or that the Great Genius blindly follows the advice of medical experts. Like his famously unrestrained consumption of fast food, nonjogging could be viewed as an appeal to his political base. It is a rejection of orthodoxy and the privileged ideology of healthy living, and proof that Trump is simultaneously an invincible superman and a man of the people, representing a clean break with the complacent traditions of the past.

Trump’s nonjogging serves to remind us not only of just how conventional and ordinary recreational running is amongst certain – often privileged – sections of the population, but also of how strongly this simple act has come to signal competence, reliability, and even virtue, in otherwise physically unremarkable and nonathletic people.

Jogging as propaganda?

Indeed, so familiar and conventional has the cosy relationship between certain virtues and jogging become, that its true significance – and specificity – only really become clear when we get a chance to see how it is viewed from the outside. In 2007, just such a perspective was provided by a coalition of left-wing French philosophers, sociologists and journalists, who took to the media to denigrate then President Nicolas Sarkozy’s well-publicised jogging habit as both ‘undignified’ and – even worse – ‘un-French’. The irate intellectuals suggested that ‘Speedy Sarko’ (a revealingly Anglophone nickname) was deploying running strategically as part of a sophisticated plot to brainwash the electorate with crass, American-style political thinking that emphasised individualism, self-betterment and relentless productivity.

Unlike in the UK and US, France at the time, there was still strong and widespread resistance to the creeping imposition of free market ideology. Intellectuals on the left, many of whom had long held sport a “lowly object in social life” anyway, saw jogging as a corrupting import from the Anglosphere that represented the right-wing, capitalist values of individualism and self-promotion they so despised. Until the brash Sarkozy, French presidents had traditionally eschewed any form of public exercise, preferring the contemplative promenade to anything so vigorous as running, which, the intellectuals railed, signified a lack of spiritual depth and even hinted at a controlling, totalitarian mindset.

Sarkozy was, they argued, using jogging as a “major weapon of media manipulation” to hoodwink the credulous masses into seeing him as capable and in control, just as those devious politicians did in neoliberal Britain and America. Luckily for the soul of France, the president’s left-wing opponents could see through this devious plot and were determined to lay it bare before the very foundations of the republic were undermined.[9]

By throwing jogging into the relief of a hostile cultural context, Sarkozy’s media mauling allows us to see just how heavily weighed down with cultural baggage this simple activity has become. Although its complex symbolism is so embedded in – and well-adapted to – our culture as to be almost invisible to us most of the time, recreational running has become suffused with potent meanings and symbolism linked to the dominant cultural values of much of the Western world.

And indeed, in the light of these impeccably respectable, establishment-endorsed credentials, it is easy to understand why the Great Outsider, Donald Trump, chose not jog. To his disenfranchised, working-class base, it would give off all the wrong signals. And anyway, if you are a “very stable genius” whose genes give you the potential to live to “200 years old”, who needs jogging anyway?

© 2025 Neil Baxter

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[1] Commander in Cheat, Rick Reilly

[3] When Presidents Play Golf – The Atlantic

[4] Running With President George W. Bush | Runner’s World (runnersworld.com)

[5] Bill Clinton’s Running Habit: A Secret Service Nightmare | Politics | US News

[6] Jogging with President George H.W. Bush — The Undefeated.

[7] Ronald Reagan’s Presidential Workout (1984) – Inside Bodybuilding

[8] Jimmy Carter’s First Road Race | Runner’s World (runnersworld.com)

[9] Sarkozy runs into a storm over his un-French habit of jogging – Independent.ie ; Sarkozy runs into trouble – Channel 4 News