Great men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit, according to a familiar aphorism. Lesser men, by comparison, cut down those trees for a few hours’ warmth. Rarely has a saying come to life so vividly as it did over the last few days in the nation’s capital.
President Donald Trump wants to renovate a local golf course on public land in his own image and tastes. To do so, he will need to clear an indeterminate number of trees from the landscape. A federal court asked the Justice Department—and, by extension, the executive branch—to provide notice before making any major changes to the course.
Trump administration officials agreed to that request and then ignored it. Bulldozers destroyed more than 400 trees at the golf course in recent days before Judge Ana Reyes, who oversees the case, intervened and issued an emergency temporary restraining order to block them. She concluded that “government officials raced to undertake the [tree removal plan] because President Trump demands haste on his redesign,” effectively forcing them to defy a federal judge’s wishes.
This chain of events does not technically amount to defiance of a federal court order. Reyes did not issue one until the damage had already been done, and there is no sign as of yet that the Trump administration is ignoring or sidestepping it. It nonetheless represents a disturbing trend in which executive branch officials treat lower federal courts, Congress, and the law itself as something to work around, avoid, and outright ignore rather than something to faithfully obey.
The East Potomac Golf Course sits on a riverside stretch of land in southwestern D.C. across from the Pentagon and just south of the Jefferson Memorial. Congress established the park in 1897 to be “forever held and used as a park for the recreation and pleasure of the people.” It was converted into a golf course in 1910.
The 36-hole fairway has served as an affordable course for the capitol’s middle-class golfers, in sharp contrast to the tonied and exclusive golf clubs that ring D.C. in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. It also played a modest role in the desegregation of public spaces in D.C. when, in 1941, three Black golfers played on the course to jeers from white golfers and under the protection of federal park police.
The course’s history changed earlier this year when the Trump administration began publicly making plans to renovate it as part of Trump’s overhaul of the capital. Local golfers and a D.C. preservation group sued the Department of the Interior in federal court, alleging that the administration was violating federal environmental and rulemaking laws by moving forward without public input.
Initially, litigants asked for a temporary restraining order that would prevent the administration from making major changes to the golf course while litigation continued. But the Justice Department assured Judge Ana Reyes that this wasn’t necessary. “Instead of entering injunctive relief, the Court agreed to accept the Government’s repeated assurances that it would notify Plaintiffs and the Court of any major developments at the Course outside of ordinary maintenance,” she said in Tuesday’s opinion.
Things changed earlier this year when Trump personally claimed that he would be renovating the site. The president announced in July that his administration would be replacing “the dilapidated, worn out, and very dangerous and outdated Golf Course known as East Potomac Golf Links” with “one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World” that would have “the ability to host Major Golf Tournaments” like the U.S. Open and the PGA Tour.
This drew some concern from the plaintiffs, but Reyes again demurred on setting hard limits on the administration’s actions. “If we get bulldozers on site and they start mowing down half the golf course, ... that’s irretrievable, which is why the one thing I have done is ask them not to do that before giving us all notice,” she said during a hearing later in July.
While other federal judges have abandoned giving the Trump administration any presumption of regularity, Reyes did not. “The only reason I’m not making an injunction order is because I don’t want to put people through contempt proceedings,” she told Justice Department lawyers during the hearing. “I want to trust that people are acting in good faith and have them acting in good faith until proven otherwise, and you have not proven otherwise to me in this litigation.”
Even after the National Park Service began removing dead and dying trees the following month, Reyes did not act. But she indicated to the lawyers that removing healthy, living trees would be altogether different—a red line of sorts, though she did not use those words. “The Court has given the Government ‘the benefit of the doubt’ that it would not ‘act first and ask forgiveness later,’” she wrote in Tuesday’s order, quoting from her earlier comment in litigation. “The Government then did precisely what Plaintiffs feared.”
There are an estimated 3,800 trees at the East Potomac Golf Course. Removing about 430 healthy trees may only amount to roughly 10 percent of the total foliage at the golf course, but that is no small amount. A person who lost 10 percent of the hair follicles on their head would almost certainly notice a difference.
The Trump administration, for its part, insists that it is merely implementing a “Cultural Landscape Report” that was drafted and published in 2019. Trump’s personal and public demands, in its telling, have almost nothing to do with the sudden defoliation of the East Potomac Golf Course. “It is a coincidence, the Government seems to suggest, that DOI cut down hundreds of trees at the Course weeks after the President asked DOI to cut down trees at the Course, and not, say, any other time in the last seven years,” Reyes observed.
Concerns about the golf course’s renovation are well founded. Trump’s changes to date in Washington, D.C., have not gone well. He turned the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall into a cultivation tank for green sludge. He demolished the East Wing of the White House, which belongs to the nation, to build an illegal ballroom and secret bunker for himself. He plans to build a 250-foot arch right in the middle of D.C. National Airport’s landing and takeoff paths.
As important as these outcomes are, it also matters how Trump and his underlings reached them. The administration’s apparent strategy on multiple fronts is to break the law and then make it substantively impossible for a court to address or remedy the damage. This has been most visible in immigration cases, where ICE has alternatively slow-walked or defied court orders in countless cases. It has also operated in ways that make litigation against it difficult, if not impossible.
ICE’s hostility to the legal system is unsurprising since it is a venue in which it often loses. By one analysis, the Trump administration has lost more than 10,000 separate cases involving its immigration-detention policies. One of those policies is to mandatorily detain immigrants without bond hearings in squalid conditions in the hopes that they can be coerced into self-deporting. More than 500 federal judges have ruled against this policy, and the Supreme Court will review it later this term. For untold numbers of immigrants, however, the damage is already done.
Now that hostility for the rule of law is bleeding into the rest of the federal government, with dire consequences for democratic governance. By recklessly ignoring federal law as written by Congress, the Trump administration has accumulated more power for itself by turning Trump’s executive orders and personal instructions into the ersatz United States Code. By treating federal judicial orders as optional, the White House and its subordinates have gravely damaged those courts’ authority.
Lawlessness also begets lawlessness. Imagine if the next Democratic president, frustrated by the Supreme Court’s past rulings on student loan debt relief, sent armed federal agents into debt servicers’ facilities and destroyed the records of who owes payments. Perhaps the next Democratic administration could flood the airwaves with illegal taxpayer-funded PSAs about Republicans’ links to Jeffrey Epstein on the eve of the 2030 midterms. A Democratic president might even be tempted to order the arrest Trump administration officials who orchestrated the illegal war against Iran, then drop them off at The Hague before anyone’s lawyer could write a motion to stop them.
The Trump administration may find all of these concerns to be tedious and pointless. They may simply regard federal public property as Trump’s personal property, as if he had acquired the United States itself in a leveraged buyout on election night in 2024. Trumpworld may tire of liberal judges and lawmakers standing in the way of Trump carrying out what they regard as the sovereign will of the American people. They would be mistaken to think this way. The American constitutional order grew over the course of centuries, watered by generations who hoped its canopy would cover future generations, as well. Trump’s allies can hack at its roots today, but they will miss its shade tomorrow.