Nearly 50 miles of worn highways, rusting bridges, crowded urban neighborhoods, peaceful woodlands and quiet horse farms separates the 16-acre Manhattan postage stamp of terrorism known as Ground Zero from the sprawling 520-acre golf course in New Jersey owned by former President Donald Trump.
But in the coming days, those pieces of landscape are likely to be joined together in a deeply emotional debate over America’s deadliest terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Trump has rented out his country club in Bedminster, New Jersey, for another leg in the LIV Golf Series, which is financed in part by $2 billion from a special so-called wealth fund controlled by the Saudi Arabian government with reported payouts to some top players of up to $150 million and undisclosed millions for Trump.
This big-money tournament, scheduled for July 29-31 at the Trump National Golf Club, comes amid a steady torrent of newly declassified FBI reports, showing that a dozen or more Saudi officials — including one member of the Saudi royal family — provided logistical help to 19 radicalized Islamists who carried out the 9/11 attacks.
The fact that a former president is hosting the tournament—and stands to profit from it—has reopened deep wounds among many relatives and friends of 9/11 victims.
“We’ve had to grow a tough skin over the last 20 years, but this is cruel and callous,” said Dennis McGinley of Haworth, New Jersey, 56, a financial adviser who lost his brother Daniel, of Ridgewood, New Jersey, in the rubble of New York’s World Trade Center that came to be known as “Ground Zero.”
“Forget that it’s unpresidential,” McGinley said of Trump. “It’s so hurtful to the 9/11 community.”
McGinley’s brother Marty, 60, of Westwood, New Jersey, also a financial adviser, agreed.
“We’ve taken so many punches in the gut,” he said. “But, my God, I can’t imagine this happening.”
Backlash and optics crisis for Trump
Already, the so-called “9/11 community,” the loose-knit but remarkably loyal group of thousands of victims’ relatives, survivors and advocates, is planning at least two press conferences in the days leading up to the golf tournament in Bedminster. Other plans under discussion by the group involve lining roads with placard-carrying protesters, buying space on highway billboards and showing up at hotels where golfers may be staying.
For Trump, the optics of any kind of protest near his golf course would be yet another blow to…
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