Donald Trump has wanted the Open Championship back at his Scottish course for over a decade. On Monday, the body that runs it gave him the closest thing to an encouraging answer he has received in years.

At the press conference held at Royal Birkdale ahead of this summer’s Open Championship, R&A Chief Executive Martin Darbon was asked whether Trump’s Turnberry resort was still being considered for a future edition of the tournament. His answer was pretty direct and a positive update.

“Turnberry is still in our thinking,” he said. “We really like the golf course.”

Trump bought the Turnberry resort in April 2014 and has long pushed for it to return to the Open rotation, going as far as reportedly making requests to Prime Minister Keir Starmer to lobby for the venue to be selected. The course has not hosted the Open since 2009, five years before Trump’s purchase, and the wait has been a source of visible frustration for him. Trump has said far lesser courses had been awarded the championship, hitting out at what he called the false reputation and controversy surrounding it.

The snub for most of the period since 2014 was not purely about logistics. Five days after the 2021 Capitol riots, the then-R&A chief executive Martin Slumbers issued a firm statement that there were no plans to host another Open at Turnberry.

“The position at the moment in respect of Turnberry is that we will not be taking it until we’re comfortable that the whole dialogue will be about golf,” Slumbers said.

The message was quite pointed: Trump’s ownership and the noise that came with it were the problem and not the course itself. And he stayed in that position for years. He did not soften on his position or his way out of the door. As recently as November 2024, just before leaving the role, he reiterated that R&A had no immediate plans to bring any of its champions to Turnberry and that Trump’s return to the White House would not change the calculus. And then, Darbon took over.

Darbon stopped talking about politics and started talking about logistics instead. When pressed on specific hurdles at Monday’s media day, Darbon pointed to infrastructure rather than politics.

“We know that there are some logistical challenges that relate to staging a modern Open Championship; they’re primarily off the course,” he said. He also added that R&A has “a really good dialogue with the club and its ownership.” Pretty transparent discussion there.”

R&A officials have said attendance limitations and other operations are reasons for the club not hosting an Open since 2009, not any political issues with President Trump.

— Front Office Sports (@FOS) April 27, 2026

The dialogue has also been evolving. Earlier in 2025, Darbon met with Eric Trump and other members of the Trump Golf Organization. He described the meeting as productive, with the club’s leadership gaining a clear understanding of the R&A’s position.

However, the scale of the challenge remains significant. Only about 1,200,000 fans attended the 2009 Open at Turnberry, which is modest compared to the 3,000,000+ attendees the championship now attracts. Turnberry officials have consistently argued that concerns about infrastructure are exaggerated, noting that major road and rail connections are easily accessible from the Ayrshire course.

Amid all of this, the 2028 Open was confirmed on Monday for Royal Lytham and St. Anne’s, meaning the earliest championship at Turnberry could at least be pushed to 2029. With all that said, Darbon acknowledged as much, saying the dialogue would continue but that there is “not a huge amount of news to report.” Still, after several years of not being discussed at all, this progress Trump will not have missed.

With that said, it would not be the first time R&A has brought a course back from the cold.

Muirfield showed the R&A’s “NO” is not always final

Turnberry is not the only course to have been frozen out of the Open for reasons that were outside the fairways. In 2016, the R&A removed Muirfield from the rota after the club voted to maintain its men-only membership policy. The decision was not about the course; it was about optics, reputation, and what the championship wanted to be seen standing beside.

Martin Slumbers, then R&A CEO, again stood on the good side and reacted immediately.

“The Open is one of the world’s great sporting events, and going forward, we will not stage the championship at a venue that does not admit women as members. If the policy at the club should change, we would reconsider Muirfield as a venue for The Open in the future.”

And with that, he had closed the door, but the same door was left ajar in a similar breath.

A year later, in March 2017, the club was asked to vote for the second time, and it was passed with 80.2% in favor. The R&A moved quickly to reinstate Muirfield in the Open by admitting its first members in 2019. Muirfield returned to host the Open in 2022.

Sadly, the parallel is not perfect. Muirfield’s comeback required a concrete, verifiable change in policy. Turnberry’s situation, however, is murkier. The politics around Trump have not disappeared; they have simply become easier to set aside in the current climate.

But the Muirfield precedent does establish one thing clearly: when the R&A says a course is not on the rota, that is not the same as saying it will never be. Circumstances have changed, with leadership, and sometimes a golf course that everyone agrees is genuinely world-class gets another chance.

Trump Turnberry will have to wait until at least 2029 to host another Open Championship.