an unfortunate reality check about the strangest exchange of the evening between Trump and Biden.

In the first hour and 20 minutes of Thursday night’s presidential debate, Joe Biden and Donald Trump debated the day’s defining issues with grace and thought. After fulfilling their democratic duties – Trump by honestly laying out his policy proposals, Biden by effectively stringing together multiple sentences – the candidates took a well-deserved break to talk golf.

Moderator Dana Bash asked the candidates their age (78 for Trump, 81 for Biden). Trump, who had boasted about his performance on cognitive and fitness tests, took his answer to the links.

“I just won two “Two regular club championships — not even senior championships,” the former president said, as recreational golfers around the world pointed to their TVs like this Leonardo DiCaprio meme. “Two regular club championships. You have to be pretty smart to do that and be able to hit the ball far. He can’t do that. He can’t hit a ball 50 yards. He challenged me to a golf match; he can’t hit a ball 50 yards.”

Biden responded: “I would be happy to host a driving competition. When I was vice president, I was able to lower my handicap to six. By the way, I’ve already told you that I’d be happy to play golf with you if you carry your own bag. Do you think you can do that?” Trump was incredulous: “That’s the biggest lie of all – that he had a handicap of six.” (In golf, a lower handicap is better. It more or less indicates how many strokes over par a player can score in a given round. Anything in the single digits is good, and anything close to zero is Great.)

Biden then said: “I had a handicap of eight. Eight.” He tried to continue speaking, but the words couldn’t come out, so it’s not clear whether he ultimately claimed to have a handicap of six or eight.

“I’ve seen your swing,” Trump said. “I know your swing. Let’s not act like children.”

Who would win this golf match in hell? First, a quick fact check: When it comes to their respective golf skills, both presidential candidates have talked absolute nonsense, although Biden was at least factually close when describing his own handicap. His last official handicap index with the United States Golf Association was 6.7, but he hasn’t posted a score since 2018.

Trump’s history of golf cheating and lying about his exploits is nothing new. It’s the subject of an entire book and countless testimonies. Over the years, Trump’s playing partners have described all the usual types of golf cheating: taking mulligans in supposedly competitive games, moving his ball to a more favorable position, throwing it out of a bunker onto the grass. He does it all. Rick Reilly, the author of the book on Trump’s golf cheating, told Vox in 2019 that Trump “cheats like a Mafia accountant,” adding, “He kicks the ball so much that the caddies call him Pelé.”

These are common ways golfers lower their own scores, and in this Trump is no different from any typical rich asshole who loves golf. But he is different from a cheap country club member because he owns numerous golf clubs and uses his status to ascribe club championships to himself. Each golf club holds a championship each year to crown the club’s best player. Reilly described how Trump amassed club championships by purchasing a club, organizing a match between himself and the previous champion, and declaring himself the winner of that match. No one but Melania Trump would be present to act as a witness, and even if Trump won fair and square, it would not be the same as winning a “club championship.”

Is Trump actually good at golf? That’s hard to say, in part because “good” is a moving target for all amateurs. Trump is an unathletic-looking 78-year-old, and most of his thousands of rounds of golf have been played out of the public eye. It’s easy, however, to find a video of Trump 2023 missing an extremely straight-line pitch shot right in front of the green with a brutal shank. All golfers hit terrible shots, but the one caught on video was so bad that it would be quite unusual for the best player at a club. Trump reports a stellar 2.5 handicap with the USGA, which I find completely implausible. It’s what golfers would call a “vanity handicap,” the product of rigged scorekeeping, and no one in Trump’s world is trying to stop him. (Since his 2016 election, he has only posted two scores and doesn’t typically post his overall scores on the internet.)

However, many of the best golfers in the world have attested that Trump is a pretty good player. There is a certain partisan bias at play; you probably don’t know play with Trump, unless you are a Fan of Trump, such as US Open champion and Trump star Bryson DeChambeau or all-time majors leader Jack Nicklaus. The Golden Bear has said Trump is the best player of the several presidents he has played with. But Nicklaus is also a Trump sycophant who lacks the courage of his Trumpist convictions. And no person in the history of the world has had better access to world-class facilities and instruction than Donald Trump, so his not To be a pretty good player would be amazing.

Biden doesn’t brag about how good he is at golf for so long. His handicap as vice president was 6.7, not far from the “six” and “eight” he alternately cited in his arguments with Trump. But the idea that Biden is currently good at golf is, um, questionable. He doesn’t play as regularly as Trump did during his time in the White House. Biden’s swing looked pretty good for a senior in late 2022, but I don’t think the president is in his golf prime.

The president’s campaign staff is obsessed with finding ways to make him look spry, agile and energetic. To that end, there have been a handful of photo ops with him on a bicycle. Unlike Trump and Barack Obama, he has had few if any on the golf course. (In 2012, Biden and Obama played with John Boehner and John Kasich, who later joked that Biden exaggerated his skills.) When the Biden campaign released a five-minute video of Biden “playing golf” in Michigan, it didn’t show him swinging a club—just a quick putt at the end of the video. If anyone had thought it looked good, we all would have seen more of it.

So to answer the most important question of a fine evening for America: I don’t think Biden would beat Trump in a golf game right now. Nor do I think Trump could come anywhere close to keeping up with the best player at any of his clubs in an officially scored game. But at least both Biden and Trump have done something comparable by putting their golf skills on display for the public. Consumption.

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