Trump biographer says he was booted off Trump Florida golf course with David Koch
President-elect Donald Trump kicked one of his less favorable biographers, Harry Hurt III, off his golf course in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Friday, according to a Facebook post from the author.
Hurt said he was about to play a round of golf with a group that included billionaire David Koch at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. Hurt posted an account of the incident, first reported by Politico, on his Facebook page.
“I said, ‘Congratulations, sir,’ and shook his hand,” Hurt said to Mr. Trump, according to the post. “Trump said, ‘You were rough on me, Harry. Really rough. That (expletive) you wrote.’”
Mr. Trump was referring to Hurt’s 1993 biography of Trump: “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump.” In it, Hurt was critical of Trump, writing that Mr. Trump’s ex-wife Ivana alleged during a deposition that Mr. Trump “raped” her during the divorce proceedings.
Hurt said he looked at Mr. Trump Friday and responded, “It’s all true.” He said Mr. Trump replied, “Not in the way you wrote it.”
Mr. Trump then reportedly told Hurt it was “inappropriate” for him to play at his club -- and had security escort the whole group, including Koch, out of the club.
The Koch brothers, famous for their financial generosity to various conservative political causes, had worked to prevent Mr. Trump from receiving the GOP presidential nomination last year. The president-elect and David Koch reportedly met in Florida last month to patch up their differences after the election.
Another member of the group, GOP donor John M. Damgard, told a slightly different story of the encounter: he said the group had no interaction was security and was not escorted off the premises, just that Hurt told them he had been asked to leave.
“Harry just said he had been asked to leave,” Damgard said. “I thought he was kidding. And then I learned that there had been some previous bad blood between them from back in the ‘90s apparently.”
