For weeks, the strangest courtroom drama in Washington turned on a simple question: was the president telling the truth about his own government’s plans, or were his own officials? President Donald Trump had announced on social media that East Potomac Golf Links — the scruffy, beloved, forty-eight-dollar public golf course on a Potomac River peninsula — would close on November 15 for a fifteen-month transformation into a championship venue. His Justice Department lawyers and Park Service officials, testifying under oath, said they knew of no such plan. On Wednesday night, the Trump administration finally resolved the contradiction in the president’s favor. In a court filing, the Justice Department confirmed that the National Park Service “will close East Potomac Park south of Buckeye Drive, including the Golf Course, consistent with the President’s directive,” and that a design by the celebrated golf architect Tom Fazio will be submitted to the National Capital Planning Commission on Friday, October 30, for consideration at its December 3 meeting.
What the filing commits the government to
The notice lays out a two-step process. First, the Fazio rendering: a “World Class, championship-level golf course” capable, the filing says, of hosting major events such as the U.S. Open — and, in the president’s telling, the PGA Championship, the Ryder Cup and the Presidents Cup. The current facility’s three courses, where fees now top out at $48, are expected to be consolidated into an upscale eighteen-hole layout, with a new driving range and putting course, designed to test elite players. Second, the closure itself: on November 15, the National Links Trust, the nonprofit that operates the course under lease, will hand over operations after business hours following changes to that lease; the trust will retain its other two public facilities in the city. The closure sweeps in far more than golf — the miniature golf course and Ohio Drive, the loop road around the peninsula that is a daily destination for walkers, joggers and cyclists, will also shut for the duration of the renovation. The department argued the closure of the park “is necessary regardless of the ultimate design of the golf course, given the significant safety hazards at East Potomac Park.”
How the case got here: 430 trees and a furious judge
The litigation, brought by the DC Preservation League and two local golfers challenging the overhaul of the historic public park, had already produced scenes without modern precedent. Trump announced the closure in a Truth Social post on October 18, calling the existing course “old, broken, dilapidated, and of no further use or effect” and promising that when completed it would be “open to the Public while, at the same time, designed to the Highest Level of Golf.” But at an October 19 hearing, Stanley Woodward, the Justice Department’s third-ranking official, told U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes that “there is no plan to close the course,” and the acting director of the National Park Service, Jessica Bowron, testified that she was not aware of closure plans either.
Before that hearing, something else had happened. On October 10, dozens of National Park Service workers cut down 430 trees at the course in a single day; the government plans to remove about 300 more. The litigants challenging the project were notified at 4:55 p.m. on October 9, hours before the heavy equipment moved in. At an emergency hearing on October 12, Judge Reyes was, by her own description, furious. “More than being upset and furious right now, I am just deeply disappointed in the government,” she told the government’s lawyers. “On what universe did anyone in your office think this was acceptable?” — and, in a separate account of the same hearing: “I trusted you all not to do precisely what you have done.” Park superintendent Kevin Griess testified that the felled trees had not been identified as hazardous or as safety concerns, citing a 2019 Park Service landscape report as the basis for the cutting; the president, in his posts, has pointed to “falling, dangerous, and disease infested trees.” On October 26, Reyes issued a preliminary injunction barring the government from cutting down or damaging more trees and requiring advance written notice before any “irreparable modification” while the lawsuit continues. This week she ordered Woodward to appear and explain whether a closure plan existed — an order Wednesday’s filing effectively answered.
Trump has additionally claimed that a White House staffer was “hit violently in the chest” at the course, and has said his administration would hold Judge Reyes responsible if anyone is hurt or killed there — claims that have not been independently verified and that skeptics, including The Bulwark’s Sam Stein, have publicly questioned. Park Service statements have separately noted that debris from the White House East Wing demolition dumped on the grounds tested positive for lead, chromium and other toxic metals, a detail critics cite in questioning the project’s management.
The National Links Trust, which will hand over the course on November 15, is itself part of the story. The nonprofit took over Washington’s three municipal courses — East Potomac, Rock Creek and Langston — under a long-term arrangement with the Park Service precisely to rescue them from decades of deferred maintenance while keeping them public and affordable, and it will continue operating the other two after East Potomac closes. Its displacement from the flagship property, by lease changes rather than by any failure the government has alleged, underscores that what is being contested here is not the competence of the course’s stewards but the purpose of the land. The design’s cost has not been disclosed, and the planning commission that will judge it on December 3 is the same body, restocked by the president, that has approved his other Washington projects. Judge Reyes, meanwhile, has directed Woodward and a representative of the Interior Department’s solicitor’s office to attend a further status hearing on Friday — meaning the courtroom scrutiny of the gap between the president’s posts and his government’s testimony is not finished, even now that the filing has closed it.
What is really being argued about
Beneath the courtroom theater lies a genuine argument about what public land in the capital is for. East Potomac is one of the most democratic sporting spaces in America: a national-park golf course, minutes from the monuments, where a round costs less than a round of drinks at the private clubs an hour away, and where the clientele has always reflected the whole city. The administration’s vision replaces that with a championship stage set — a course designed to lure the U.S. Open and the Ryder Cup to the capital, with Fazio, who has worked on four previous Trump courses, as its architect. No tournament body has awarded the site an event, and majors are granted by the USGA, the PGA of America and the PGA Tour, not by presidents; Trump properties, including Doral, which hosted a PGA Tour event this year, and the LIV Golf stops at Bedminster and Trump National Washington, have deep ties to professional golf’s power brokers.
Opponents, led by the Preservation League plaintiffs, argue that a high-end course will change the character of the space and price out the public that owns it, and that the process — announcements by social media post, sworn testimony at odds with those posts, trees felled overnight — has denied Washingtonians the lawful planning process the government’s own filing now promises to follow “in finalizing and implementing the Fazio plan.” The planning commission, whose board the president has restocked with loyalists and which has reliably approved his other proposals, will take up the design on December 3. The course itself goes dark on November 15. What returns, fifteen months later, will tell the city which argument won.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from The Associated Press (via Raw Chili), Bloomberg Law, Golf.com and Golfweek (USA Today).