Donald Trump has reportedly been banned from playing golf as the US Secret Service feel it poses a security risk.
The presidential candidate has survived two assassination attempts this year, the first a shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, and a second outside the Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach.
The FBI swooped on a second effort in September when shots were fired in the vicinity but the Republican was never in danger, it was reported at the time.
US Secret Service agents opened fire after seeing a person with a firearm near the golf club as the former president golfed, according to local media reports.
The person fled in an SUV and was later apprehended in a nearby county by local police.
Ryan Routh has since been charged with trying to assassinate the 2016-20 president.
The Secret Service had been present for the enitre time that Mr Trump was playing golf, but nevertheless, it has been reported that he will be held on a tight lead from now on.
Sky has reported that he has promised not to play again until the election on November 5.
Mr Trump is a golf fanatic and is estimated to have played 261 rounds while he was president – about once every five or six days.
He challenged his rival and current president Joe Biden to a match in July. He later teed off in a verbal tirade against his new election opponent Kamala Harris while sitting, calm and relaxed, in a golf buggy.
Mr Trump is campaigning in California this weekend, a state he is set to lose to Ms Harris in the election.
He is visiting Coachella in between stops in Nevada, at a roundtable outside Las Vegas for Latinos earlier Saturday, and Arizona, for a rally Sunday in Prescott Valley. He narrowly lost those two swing states to Democrat Mr Biden in 2020.
The news about his golf playing days being up coincides with a growing row over his own course in Aberdeenshire.
Trump International has billed the new 18-hole championship links near Balmedie as “one of the most environmentally-friendly and sustainable courses ever built”.
The company said “virtually all the materials” used in the construction of the new course – named MacLeod after Mr Trump’s Lewis-born mother – were locally sourced and that it had a sustainable irrigation system.
It also said “more than one million sprigs of native marram grass” had been planted and “six tons of marram seeds” sown on the course, which spans sand dunes, heathland and wetland areas.
Environmental campaigners, however, have questioned the course’s green credentials.
They point out that work done to construct the original links at Menie – to which the new MacLeod course is an extension – did irreversible damage to the Foveran Links sand dunes, which led national nature agency Nature Scot to “de-notify” it as a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) in 2020.
In a 2019 statement following the announcement of the decision, Scottish Wildlife Trust chief executive Jo Pike said: “Building Trump International Golf Links on a unique dune system has destroyed the dynamic nature that made it special.
“It is therefore wholly unsurprising that the area will lose its SSSI status.”
Speaking to the i newspaper on Saturday, Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said the idea that building another 18-hole course next to the existing one could be environmentally friendly was, therefore, “laughable” and “complete nonsense” .
He told the newspaper: “The damage is severe and irreparable, so there is no way they can credibly make that claim.”
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By: Kevin Cunningham