President Trump has always had a complicated relationship with hackers. After all, if Russian intelligence agents hadn’t heeded his call to find Hillary Clinton’s email — “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing” — he might not be in the White House right now.
Remarkably, however, since his inauguration, there has been remarkably few publically revealed incidents of anti-Trump hacking that have occurred, with the formerly prominent hacking collective known as Anonymous virtually ceasing all known activity during his administration.
While many American progressives have been wondering whether an altruistic left-leaning hacking group would manage to uncover the unredacted Mueller report or a copy of Trump’s suppressed tax returns, the first major cybersecurity incident targeting the president wound up being a much more frivolous affair as the U.S. Golf Association (USGA) announced that President Trump’s official registry of golf scores had been compromised, according to a report at Golfweek.
The hack to Trump’s account in USGA’s Golf Handicap and Information Network (GHIN) system was discovered after abnormally poor scores were posted to the system on Friday, a rare day when the president was not even reported to have abandoned the stress of executive time for a taxpayer-subsidized journey to one of his own golf courses.
It was not just the fact that Trump was not scheduled to play golf on that day that raised suspicions at the USGA. The fact that the scores were much worse than the president — a notorious cheater at the game with such a strong sense of vanity about his published scores that he is willing to cheat a child to improve his score — would ever admit to was also a major tipoff in alerting the organization to the possibility that Trump’s account had been accessed without authorization.
“We have become aware of reports in the media questioning recent scores posted on President Trump’s GHIN account. As we dug into the data it appears someone has erroneously posted a number of scores on behalf of the GHIN user,” a statement from the USGA said.
“We are taking corrective action to remove the scores and partnering with our allied golf associations and their member clubs to determine the origin of the issue,” the statement continued.
The “erroneous” scores were all in the triple digits, an anomaly for Trump whose scores typically are self-reported as ranging from the high 60s to the mid-80s and who maintains a handicap index of 2.8, a number that even the USGA admits is “excessively flattering.”
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Perhaps the hackers who accessed Trump’s golf handicap registry were making a political point about the president’s pervasive prevarication. On the other hand, maybe the perpetrators were angry fellow golfers livid at the cheater-in-chief’s frequent falsification of his scores.
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Either way, their actions merely highlight how President Trump’s compulsive lying infiltrate every aspect of his life.
Now, hackers, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the missing portions of the Mueller report and those elusive tax returns. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
Original reporting by Eamon Lynch and Bill Speros at Golfweek and by Rachel Frazin at The Hill.
