When Donald Trump flies over Washington’s East Potomac Park, as he does on his helicopter rides to Joint Base Andrews, he sees a piece of prime waterfront real estate with serious PGA potential. In what might as well be another episode of Extreme Makeover: Capital Edition, the president wants to convert the more than 300-acre man-made island and its affordable golf course into a championship-worthy destination. But it turns out that there’s a lot you can’t perceive from the sky.
The park, which Trump visited for 90 minutes in June, buzzes with life. Municipal golfers—hardly the country-club set—trek across the green. Cyclists and runners collect miles on Ohio Drive, the road that circles the wing-shaped island. Fishers and picnickers sit along Hains Point, the park’s tip. Many locals fear that they could lose all of this if the president gets his golf-course glow-up.
Although it sits just south of Washington’s expanse of monuments, East Potomac Park isn’t typically a site of controversy. Usually, its biggest moment comes each spring, when its cherry trees blossom. But the attention was less cheerful on Saturday, when the National Park Service went on a sudden tree-chopping spree. The agency cut down more than 400 trees along the course, prompting worries that it might be using maintenance as a cover for beginning work on Trump’s grander plans, which still face bureaucratic hurdles.
On Monday, timber was piled up on the golf course. Among the standing trees, I counted about 75 marked with caution tape to save them from the axe. A lone protester held a sign that read Stop Tree Genocide. Ana C. Reyes, the federal judge presiding over a lawsuit about the renovation, lambasted the administration in an emergency court hearing that day, saying that officials had lost all credibility in the case. She has since extended an order to stop the government from clearing trees through October 26 and is requiring the administration to provide three business days’ notice before it makes irreparable changes to the golf course.
A lawyer for the government told Reyes that officials had done their best to notify her of their plans ahead of time, as she’d requested. “No, you did not do your best,” Reyes said. “You did your absolute worst.”
Few know what will happen to East Potomac Park if Trump gets his way. Full plans for the golf-course project have not been released, and the National Park Service canceled a historic-preservation meeting, which might have offered the public some insight. (The park is on the National Register of Historic Places and is subject to extensive review.) But Trump has given indications that this public park might soon take on a more exclusive air. For many, last year’s sudden East Wing demolition destroyed a symbol of the American people. The plans for East Potomac Park represent something far more tangible; people feel that the White House is trying to seize part of their neighborhood.
There’s another, even lesser-known corner of East Potomac Park. Hidden beneath a canopy of trees lies the cutest potential casualty of the renovation projects that have occupied much of Trump’s time during his second term: the country’s oldest continually running mini-golf course. (There are competing claims to that superlative.) It’s a microcosm of a microcosm—the most welcoming place in a park made, by congressional act, for the public.
Perhaps the reelection of a golf-loving, resort-owning president was always going to affect the three low-cost municipal golf courses in Washington, D.C., which are on land controlled by the National Park Service. Last December, the Trump administration suddenly terminated a nonprofit’s leases to operate the sites. That group, National Links Trust, made a deal with the White House in May to continue running two of the courses long-term and East Potomac Golf Links in the interim, before its White House–led renovation. The president tapped the well-known golf architect Tom Fazio, a longtime collaborator who has worked on a handful of Trump courses, to run the project. Trump criticized the site as “dilapidated, worn out, and very dangerous and outdated” and vowed to turn it into a host site for major tournaments. Creating such a course would likely require taking over almost the whole park. The Washington Post reported last month that Trump has been fixated on eliminating Ohio Drive and extending the course to the island’s edge, a change that could make jogging or cycling around the park impossible.
In response to questions about the project, a White House spokesperson told me that Trump would restore its “glamour and prestige,” writing, “As a private citizen, President Trump built some of the greatest golf courses in the world, and he is now extending his unmatched design skills and excellent eye for detail to D.C.’s East Potomac Golf Links.” The Department of the Interior told me that “DOI and NPS are committed to continuing the relationships we have built with the local golf communities to ensure these courses are safe, beautiful, open, affordable, enjoyable, accessible, and world-class for people living in and visiting the greatest capital city in the world.” DOI did not respond when asked a second time about whether the mini-golf course will remain. The attraction did not seem to be included in renderings of the course disseminated by the National Garden of American Heroes Foundation, a Trump-associated fundraising entity. Nor was mini-golf visible on a design of the new course that Trump was photographed holding during his summer tour.
This may seem like a small problem—mini, even. But the humble course speaks to the broader dismissiveness toward D.C. residents that has characterized Trump’s impositions on the capital. The changes can be felt across the city: the year-plus deployment of National Guard troops on neighborhood streets; the fencing-off of public spaces such as Lafayette Square; the takeover of the Kennedy Center, which has been all but shut down. Municipal golf courses, which are owned or operated by local governments, are known for widening access to a sport associated with the wealthy. Nowhere is this democratic spirit more alive than on a municipal mini-golf course frequented by children, parents, and newbies to the green.
Somehow, on my first round of the fun-size sport in more than a decade, I hit a hole in one. I played the mini-golf course this spring with Ryan Moody, a landscape architect who’d worked on a 2024 renovation of the mini course, and Michael McCartin, a co-founder of National Links Trust. As we strolled past the classical-columned clubhouse, Moody mentioned that he was planning to host his son’s fifth-birthday party there; McCartin said that he was pretty sure he’d had his own tenth birthday at the mini-golf course, decades ago.
The mini course has a retro feel and a simple design that should not be mistaken for technical simplicity. It might be the toughest mini-golf course in the country, McCartin warned. There’s no rating system, he clarified, but whereas newer mini-golf courses are dominated by easier holes, this one is full of elaborate, multistep excursions. Nearly 100 years old, it is blissfully uninterested in granting players instant gratification.
Mini-golf conjures images of theme-park kitsch—faux volcanos, towering plastic dinosaurs. With its clean lines, concrete edges, stone walls, and limited color palette, the East Potomac mini-golf course is closer to bureaucracy-core. It has some decorative touches: a loop-de-loop here and a wishing well there, but overall, the atmosphere is understated. You’re supposed to feel like you’re golfing in a garden, Moody told me.
As actual golfers took their shots on the larger courses around us, McCartin coached us. At one point, I thought I’d hit another hole in one, but then I discovered that the ball had gone through a hidden tunnel and ended up on another green with even more steps to the actual finish. On another hole, I simply gave up counting my attempts, which were well into the double digits.
One hole involved hitting the ball through replicas of nearby landmarks. (You could imagine the addition of a triumphal arch if the course survives.) When I accidentally overshot a ball and it flew over the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and Mount Vernon, my golfing partners let me keep going from where it landed. Jumping over governmental obstacles felt like some kind of metaphor.
Remote and central at the same time, East Potomac Park provides an escape from city life. Congress designated the site in 1897 “to be forever held and used as a park for the recreation and pleasure of the people.” Alex Rosen, a D.C. resident who recently founded Save East Po, an activist group opposing Trump’s renovation, told me that every addition to the park, such as the cherry trees and Ohio Drive, “has broadened and expanded what it means to have recreation on this peninsula.”
The 18-hole mini-golf course opened during the Great Depression and became among the park’s most popular sites. When Moody took on its revamp, the tiny course was in disrepair, but he studied old photos and tried to bring past elements back, such as catenary lighting that once kept the place open late. “It’s respectful of the historic layout of the course,” he said, a layout that has “stood the test of time.” In contrast, the plan for a professional-grade course risks sharing a heavy-handed quality with Trump’s other D.C. projects. Ideas like the triumphal arch are “all sort of plopped down in the landscape, aggressively and without any recognition of continuity of visual and spatial relationships,” Charles Birnbaum, an architect who leads the Cultural Landscape Foundation, a group that has opposed many of Trump’s changes, told me.
The mini-golf course may have continuity with the landscape, but if I’m being honest, it does not have continuity with how I like to spend an afternoon. If I could save one feature of East Potomac Park from Trump’s wrecking ball, it would not be the mini. Ohio Drive has my vote. But that’s the beauty of the place. I’m not forcing the golfers to join me on my 10-mile run, and I don’t need to join them with my 10-over-par. In a world where East Potomac Park is doing what Congress intended, no activity needs to be sacrificed for anyone else’s favorite sport.