During a golf outing with his son Eric at his course in Scotland on Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump was trailed by an armored Polaris Ranger X utility task vehicle (UTV) designed to provide ballistic protection. The vehicle, now dubbed Golf Force One by the press, is “part of the Presidential fleet of specialty vehicles,” a White House spokesperson told The War Zone Monday morning. The White House provided no further details. Trump was in Scotland to host a meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at his resort, where security was beefed up.
The UTV made its first apparent public appearance just 10 months after someone tried to shoot Trump at his Florida golf course. This vehicle was made by the Polaris corporation but modified by someone else, a Polaris company spokesperson confirmed to The War Zone. You can read more about the fleet of armored vehicles protecting presidents in our story here.
The ballistic protection on the UTV at the Trump Turnberry hotel and golf course can either be added from a kit or specifically built out for the vehicle.
According to the Government Services Administration (GSA) website, a Chicago company called Scaletta Armoring makes an “add-on armor kit to Polaris XP 1000 Ranger UTV with protection scalable to mission.” The kit has a unit price of nearly $190,000.
The GSA site includes a photo, which you can see below, of a Polaris Ranger X UTV very similar to the one seen in Scotland. We reached out to Scaletta Armoring for more details.
Other companies, like MacGyver Solutions, make similar armored UTVs based on the Polaris Ranger X UTV. MacGyver has contracts to provide the U.S. Customs and Border Protection with ballistic-protected Polaris Ranger X UTVs.
Mike Jackson, who founded MacGyver, said he was unsure who provided the armor for the UTV seen at the golf course and would have to seek U.S. Secret Service (USSS) permission to provide further details.
USSS had little light to shed.
“The U.S. Secret Service employs a variety of tools and resources to safeguard our protectees,” USSS said in a statement. “In order to maintain operational security, the Secret Service does not discuss the specific means and methods used to conduct our protective operations.”’
The Polaris Ranger X is used by the military, law enforcement and many other agencies for off-road transportation. The basic version retails for about $20,000. There are multiple variants of this UTV.
“As far as armoring goes, the world is your oyster,” a U.K. law enforcement expert told The Telegraph, which first published pictures of the armored UTV. “If your threat is someone with a baseball bat, you might fit plexiglass. But if it’s a 7.62mm Dragunov sniper rifle with a full metal jacket bullet, then you need thicker transparent armour,” he said, referring to the layers of laminate which, combined with layers of glass, are used to make bullet-proof windows.
“The thicker the transparent armoring, the more tinted the window looks,” added the expert, who spoke to The Telegraph on condition of anonymity.
During his outing on Saturday, Trump was seen driving a regular golf cart in between holes. Trump is well known to enjoy driving his own cart.
The UTV was likely there in case Trump needed additional protection. Considering golf course fairways are wide open areas, having a vehicle to rapidly provide cover and whisk the president away in, even to a nearby standard up-armored vehicle, seems not just logical, but necessary. There are limits to what kinds of vehicles can travel on golf courses without destroying the manicured grass, so the UTV would still be restricted in weight and feature wide tires to spread out that weight.
Trump has already been the subject of two assassination attempts, including one at his golf course in Florida, and had previously been threatened by Iran.
The most recent attempt came Sept. 15, 2024, at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
As Trump golfed, a Secret Service agent conducting a perimeter security sweep saw the partially obscured face of a man in the brush along the fence line near the sixth hole, according to a Justice Department media release at the time.
“The agent observed the barrel of a rifle aimed directly at him,” the release stated. “As the agent began backing away, he saw the rifle barrel move, and the agent fired” at the man, later identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, of Hawaii. Routh survived and is currently in prison awaiting trial.
A few months earlier, on July 13, 2024, at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, a man fired a shot at Trump. Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, was later killed, and a bloodied Trump was whisked away.
Prior to those attempts, Iran made a veiled golf-related threat against Trump.
An image highly suggestive of a drone targeting the then-former President Trump on a golf course in a “vengeance” strike in retaliation for the death of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was posted on Twitter by an account for Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The U.S. military killed Soleimani in a drone strike in Iraq in January 2020, which had already prompted public threats from Iranian officials, including against Trump specifically.
Twitter suspended the @khamenei_site account around 15 hours after the post when the image first appeared on Jan. 21, 2020.
Trump’s famous love of golf has created problems for the Secret Service, given how frequently he plays and how difficult it is to protect someone in that situation.
“In some instances, Secret Service personnel accompanying Trump have used hand-held magnetometers to screen people for weapons. In others, spectators, vendors and reporters have walked alongside Trump without being searched at all,” The New York Times noted shortly after the assassination attempt at his Florida golf course “Agents sometimes warn people from getting too close to Trump, but the former president has usually embraced a laid-back atmosphere, inviting people to pose for pictures or talk with him.”
Trump’s courses “are generally considered among the best in the world, golf-wise. But they include security vulnerabilities that any course would have — vast spaces and often few places to take cover,” the publication added. “Trump generally drives his own golf cart, which, aside from the presidential seal, looks much like any other golf cart, devoid of bullet-resistant glass or other overt protective measures. He is often alone, with the nearest agents yards away in their own carts. Only occasionally can the service’s black SUVs get close enough to the holes to be seen nearby while Trump is playing.”
Given all this, it is surprising that this appears to be the first time Golf Force One has been seen in public. Considering that golf is Trump’s favorite pastime, it is likely we have not seen the last of this UTV.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com
