Rick Reilly hasn’t been seen or heard from since his last ESPN.com column in 2014 and his last appearance on the network in 2016, but he’s been busy, most recently writing “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump,” which was released Tuesday. The book is about exactly what its title suggests, according to an advance notice and a Golf.com excerpt: President Trump’s extremely casual attitude toward the rules of the game is a reflection of his presidency as a whole.

Reilly, who is promoting his book, issued his challenge to Trump on MSNBC on Tuesday.

Reilly stated, “I want to play him. I think I’m a 4.5 [handicap]. He’s a 2.8. If he plays the 2.8, I’ll play him for 100 grand, [with the money going to] either of our charities. But the rule is, we can’t play his course, we can’t use his cheating caddies and there’s gotta be a rule guy with each of us, and I’ll play him all day.”

“He cheats like a mafia accountant. He cheats crazy. He cheats whether you’re watching or not. He cheats whether you like it or not,” Reilly said on CNN’s “New Day.””

“He tried to cheat Tiger Woods in a match; Tiger hits it like this, [Trump] hits two balls in the water, doesn’t count either and pretends that he almost tied Tiger Woods. So it doesn’t matter who he is; he has to be the winner.

“What really bothers me is that he told people on the campaign trail . . . he said, ‘I’m a winner; you got to vote for me because I’ve won 18 club championships’ — he says this three or four times — ‘and that’s against the best players in the club.’ But I knew he was lying because he told me how he does it. Whenever he opens a new course that he buys, he plays the first round by himself and calls that the club championship, puts his name on the wall.”

Reilly also said Trump tells his courses to award him the club championship because of a score he shot at an entirely different course, and that he claims club championships when they’re really senior club championships.

Trump has yet to react to Reilly on Twitter, which is his favored method of contact.

In 2015, Trump remarked of cheating charges, “That’s a terrible thing to say about people, especially me. I don’t drop balls, I don’t move balls. I don’t need to.”

In a story adapted from the book for Esquire, titled “Donald Trump Never Cheats at Golf. His Caddy Does That for Him,” Reilly writes that when you are about to play golf with Trump, “brace yourself, because according to my well-placed sources, what you’re about to experience isn’t really golf. It’s more of a paramilitary heavily armed exercise with odd-shaped sticks, using a vague set of rules that requires you to lose, and it will all be over very quickly, so put your memory on “save.” First of all, you’ll play at one of Trump’s courses—since he’s been president, he’s played only at his own courses.”

“Worst cheat ever”

Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump was authored by Reilly, a former Sports Illustrated journalist. It’s a lot of fun, and it also shows the president’s shocking dishonesty as a golfer.

“Donald Trump is the worst cheat ever, and he doesn’t care who knows,” says Rick Reilly, who has known Trump for 30 years. “I always says golf is like bicycle shorts. It reveals a lot about a man. And golf reveals a lot of ugliness in this president.”

Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

“You’re mostly laughing,” Reilly says, “but at times you’re crying – how did this happen? As a golfer he really offends me. Cheating? Hate that. Driving carts on greens? Hate that. Wearing old dockers two sizes too small for him? Give me a break. Kicking your ball so often that the caddies call you Pelé? I so hate that. Most of all I hate how stupid he’s making my country look. I hate what he’s doing to my planet. I hate what he’s doing to kids at the border. I don’t mind Republicans. I just can’t stand this guy. I love golf and he has set the game back 30 years. Just when it was becoming cool with Rory McIlroy and Ricky Fowler we get this fat bozo cheating his ass off.”

Trump, according to Dr. Lance Dodes, a Harvard psychiatrist, is “a very ill man” who “exhibits all the traits of a narcissistic personality disorder.”

He reveals, “It’s terrible he should cheat at golf which is the one sport where we self-regulate. There are referees in every other sport but in golf, if you’re 200 yards away, you can kick the ball and get away with it. I called the National Golf Foundation. They said 90 per cent of golfers don’t cheat. Golf is an honest game but this guy leaves a big ugly orange stain on it. It really pisses me off.”