A golfer walks past the stump of a large tree at the East Potomac Golf Links on Monday in Washington, DC.Mark Schiefelbein/AP
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On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced plans to shut down a historic public golf course in Washington, DC, for 15 months so that he can remodel it into a facility capable of hosting international competitions like the US Open.
Construction to create “one of the Best and Most Spectacular Golf Courses anywhere in the World” at East Potomac Park would start on November 15, the president wrote on Truth Social. He did not state the cost of the project or how it would be funded.
Trump’s post comes as his project is facing local criticism and legal scrutiny. On Monday, a senior official at the Interior Department, which Trump says developed the plan for the property along with golf architect Tom Fazio, is set to testify about work that has already been done at the course.
The National Park Service started cutting down hundreds of trees at the course earlier this month, with government officials saying the removal was unrelated to Trump’s remodeling plans and instead in accordance with a 2019 Cultural Landscape Report to restore East Potomac Golf Links. Last week, US District Judge Ana C. Reyes slammed the reasoning—and the fact that the feds gave notice late on a Friday afternoon to begin cutting the next day—saying officials had “raced to undertake” the tree removal project because Trump “demands haste on his redesign” and issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting any additional tree removal through October 26.
The Justice Department requested on Friday that Reyes, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, be removed from the case, accusing her of “bias.”
As my colleague Stephanie Mencimer wrote in August, East Potomac Park, which holds the golf course and other public facilities, lies at sea level and faces regular flooding, especially as its neglected 150-year-old seawall is deteriorating:
If Trump’s hasty and ill-conceived construction fills in too much of East Potomac Park, the chronic flooding will simply move elsewhere—perhaps to nearby parts of the National Mall, such as the Jefferson Memorial, where taxpayers just spent more than $100 million rebuilding the seawall. The water, Mungeam explains, “has to go somewhere.”
Given the president’s previous renovation endeavors—where restoring spaces for public use was largely dismissed, in favor of PR and business opportunities for himself—it looks likely to become another disaster.