Mark Twain is credited with calling golf “a good walk spoiled.” He probably never said it—but the line fits the litigation over East Potomac Golf Links.
In Washington, D.C., East Potomac is a century-old, low-cost public course just south of the National Mall. President Donald Trump wants to turn it into a professional venue. The plaintiffs say he is doing it without the environmental and historic-preservation reviews federal law requires. The case may pale in comparison to weightier matters facing the country and the new Congress that arrives in January. But with Trump, the moment so often comes down to golf. In any event, the government has run roughshod over a court’s instruction, and the stakes for the rule of law are real.
It’s become another instance of the Justice Department’s bristling contempt for federal district judges. Emil Bove, then the president’s personal lawyer, later a top DOJ official, and now a federal appellate judge, is alleged to have told colleagues at the Department that courts enjoining illegal deportations could be answered with an obscenity. This is but another example of that mindset.
Trees are a big part of the case. The government says it is only restoring the course’s original look and needs no approval. The plaintiffs say—much as in the litigation over the East Wing—that the tree removal is an early, irreversible step in a redesign no one has reviewed, and that the time to litigate whether review is required is while the answer can still make a difference: before the chainsaws.
Congress set East Potomac Park aside in 1897 for the recreation and pleasure of the people. The golf course opened in 1920. It’s a model affordable public course for beginners who chunk, hook, and slice—like me. Pine Valley, Cypress Point, or Shinnecock Hills, it is not.
In 2020, the National Park Service leased the course, with two others, to the National Links Trust, a nonprofit that planned to restore them over a 50-year term. Under the Trust, annual rounds at East Potomac roughly doubled, from fewer than 60,000 to more than 120,000, by any measure a success.
Then the Trump administration settled on converting East Potomac into a high-end club to be called Washington National Golf Course.
On February 13, the D.C. Preservation League and two regular golfers sued the Interior Department, the Park Service, and others in the Washington federal district court. They allege the government is carrying out the Washington National plan without the required reviews, that the plan defeats the 1897 statute’s purpose, and that the work is being done in a drip feed of small pieces designed to finesse comprehensive judicial review.
Judge Ana Reyes, a Joe Biden judicial nominee whom Trump has called a “crazed lunatic,” is anything but. She took a pragmatic approach and deferred the request for preliminary relief, relying on the government’s representation that no plans had been approved or scheduled apart from the land filling. A Park Service official later told the court that renovation plans remained conceptual. So, Reyes directed the parties to agree that the government would notify her and the plaintiffs before any major work began.
Her reasoning was explicit. She declined to enter an injunction, she said, because she did not want to put people through contempt proceedings and wanted to trust that people were acting in good faith until proven otherwise. It was soon proven otherwise.
The only obligation she imposed was to give notice before significant maintenance—defined as removing more than ten trees—so she could decide whether to enjoin the work before it was done. There was no ambiguity.
The government gave notice at 4:55 p.m. on Friday, October 9, the eve of the Indigenous Peoples’ Day (what it’s called in D.C.) holiday weekend. The plan had been approved on October 6. Crews felled roughly 430 trees the next morning.
The stated reason is rooted in a 2019 Cultural Landscape Report, which found that a century of planting had obscured views and pulled the course away from its original links-style design—sandy, open, nearly treeless. National Mall Superintendent Kevin Griess declared under oath that the agency means to stay true to that character, that up to 529 trees not contributing to the historic landscape would be removed, and that no healthy historic trees, such as the cherries, would be cut.
The problem has two parts.
First, a Park Service deputy director testified that the project was in fact part of the President’s March 2025 executive order on making Washington safer and more beautiful, not an implementation of the 2019 report. He also acknowledged that nothing required immediate action.
Second, and in any event, the government owed the plaintiffs and the court notice before meaningful work. That notice was meant to give Judge Reyes time to decide whether the work should go forward. Telling the court five minutes before the close of business on the Friday of a holiday weekend that you are about to do the very thing you promised to warn about is too cute by half.
Reyes convened an emergency hearing on Indigenous Peoples’ Day and issued a temporary restraining order barring further removals. She told the government’s lawyers they had lost credibility with her.
The Justice Department appealed—and, audaciously, moved to disqualify her.
The disqualification motion bordered on the frivolous. Its charges: Reyes engaged in histrionics; prejudged motions not yet filed; summoned witnesses without notice on a federal holiday; and her May ruling effectively handed the plaintiffs a veto over park maintenance. It then reached into unrelated matters, including her 2025 rulings on transgender service members, to allege a pattern of animus toward the administration.
Each charge has a total answer. The veto claim sat unraised for five months. The animus claim ignores that Reyes had repeatedly declined to intervene, which suggests animus-not. And a motion that characterizes the conduct of a female judge as “histrionics” invites an unfortunate question about the Department’s choice of words. For months, Reyes gave the government the benefit of the doubt. The government then moved on a trial plan within days, told the court at 4:55 on a Friday, and now complains that the judge called witnesses to an emergency hearing on the holiday its own timing created. It is the argument of the man who murders his parents and then asks the court for mercy because he is an orphan.
Reyes denied the disqualification motion as well; she should have done. On October 26, she issued a preliminary injunction barring further tree removal and requiring ten days’ written notice before any irreversible change to the course or its closure. The government appealed that too. Days later, she opened a formal inquiry into whether government officials and Department lawyers had given her a complete and accurate account of the plans and the tree work.
Meanwhile, Trump announced that the course will close on November 15 for a renovation of more than a year, and that work would begin immediately—which does not sit easily with the government’s position that the president had given the redesign only preliminary thought.
Armageddon will not turn on whether East Potomac becomes a championship course or remains a glorified municipal practice range. But as I once learned from the iconic Judge Edward Weinfeld, there are no important and unimportant cases; each case is important, and each is demanding.
No emergency or national-security claim explains the government’s conduct here, unlike the White House ballroom, which Trump coated with a patina of national-security gloss. The record speaks for itself: months of assurances that nothing was imminent, a manic dash for approval, a Friday-evening notice, 430 trees, and then, when the federal court pushed back, a motion attacking Judge Reyes rather than defending the merits of the case.
The trees are not coming back. What Judge Reyes can still do is find out who ordered this and whether she was told the truth. That inquiry is ongoing.
Meanwhile, in the latest move in the legal battle over the course’s future, preservation groups asked Reyes to expand her injunction to prevent the administration from closing the course and surrounding parkland on November 15. They argued that the closure was the opening wedge in Trump’s relentless plan to begin construction of the new golf course without requisite approval. Hopefully, they’ll prevail before next week.
