For centuries, games have tried to give civilians some sense of the awesome power of leading an army, a city, or a nation-state. From analog classics like chess to modern favorites like Risk or Axis and Allies, all the way to video games like the Sim City and Civilization series, a surprising number of games are built around pretending to be king, or mayor, or president. As fun as they are, though, none of those games came very close to capturing the life and death responsibilities of political power. But now that Donald Trump has permanently lowered the bar on what constitutes national leadership, video games are finally capable of giving players a passable experience of what it’s like to be president—or at least what it’s like to be President Trump. The Golf Club 2, coming to the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on June 27, lets you experience the executive branch from the inside: the inside of the golf courses President Trump has visited 23 times since becoming president.
It looks like Golf Club 2 goes out of its way to capture the full range of President Trump’s duties as leader of the free world: hosting golf tournaments, generating membership fees from other players, and just sort of tuning out and enjoying the scenery. The one thing missing is a minigame allowing players to lock the press up in the basement to avoid embarrassing photos, but maybe that’ll be in the downloadable content. Even without it, Golf Club 2 is a quantum leap forward when it comes to video game simulations of political leadership. Or rather, Golf Club 2 is comparable with other golf video games; political leadership just happens to have taken a quantum leap backward and landed in the middle of a golf course.
