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Donald Trump is treating the championship golf course he wants to build in Washington, D.C., with the gravity of an actual emergency. He has posted on Truth Social about the course at least 15 times in the past few days, including a dozen posts around 1 a.m. this morning. He wrote yesterday that work “is scheduled to begin IMMEDIATELY!” And the Trump administration has brought in a team of senior Justice Department lawyers, including the agency’s third in command, to defend its actions in court. Last week, when Katie Zacharia praised Trump after he fired her as press secretary, a photo she posted contained a blurred-out map on Trump’s desk of what appeared to be the golf site. It is literally at the top of Trump’s pile.

A golf-course renovation is probably not the big priority you’d expect from the president just two weeks before the midterm elections, where his party will face voters who are frustrated by high prices and dislike his many vanity projects. But Trump doesn’t seem concerned that he may be risking another Reflecting Pool scandal at a high-stakes moment. On Sunday, he posted design plans for his PGA-worthy golf course. Right before a hearing yesterday, he called the federal judge presiding over a case about the golf course a “crazed lunatic” and claimed that the Interior Department could go ahead with his plan with no approval.

Trump has pushed to glam up the municipal golf course in East Potomac Park near the National Mall for months, insisting in June that work would begin on “one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World” on September 1. But starting such a project is more complicated than such a timeline would imply. The entire park is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and would be subject to extensive bureaucratic reviews.

On October 10, the National Park Service, with little notice, cut down more than 400 trees, leaving the timber piled up in the middle of the course and setting off fears among locals that the president planned to blow through the usual red tape and start building. But preservationists and two golfers had sued over the pending changes earlier this year. So it was back to court. There, the government said that the tree removals are part of a 2019 plan to restore the course to its historic state, even though the plan is seven years old and there was no rush before. Ana C. Reyes, the judge in the case, has been skeptical that overgrown vegetation in the park suddenly became urgent enough to necessitate removal over a holiday weekend, especially because it coincided with Trump’s pressure over the course. Reyes insisted yesterday that this could not be a coincidence.

“Both can be true,” a lawyer for the government told Reyes.

“No,” Reyes replied. “Both cannot be true. We’re not dealing with quantum physics here.”

Meanwhile, the design plans that Trump posted have sparked anger among the many locals who use East Potomac Park for recreation. The map appears to remove Ohio Drive, a popular running and cycling route, and to extend the golf course to the man-made island’s perimeter, removing space for picnickers and fishers; it also replaces the park’s three affordable golf courses (one 18-hole and two nine-holes) with a single, pro-level 18-hole course. Even the famous cherry-blossom trees there seem to be at risk of removal. The renovation would significantly shrink who is able to use a place Congress designated in 1897 “to be forever held and used as a park for the recreation and pleasure of the people.”

To get to the bottom of who ordered the tree removals and for what purpose, Reyes called in several Interior and Park Service officials to testify yesterday during a hearing that stretched some seven hours. She wanted to make sense of the contradiction between the government’s position—that this was routine work, not part of any championship-golf-course plan—and Trump’s public statements.

[Read: The cutest target of Trump’s D.C. makeover]

The entire affair has been dizzying. According to Trump’s recent posts, work on the new golf course is ready to begin, the golf architect Tom Fazio has a design, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is “very excited,” and the park will soon be closed for its big makeover. If you ask the Department of Justice, as Reyes did, Trump’s golf-course plan has not been finalized. There has been no “final agency action,” DOJ lawyers argue, meaning that according to the Administrative Procedure Act, the plan cannot yet be scrutinized in court. Fazio has no contract with the government, they said, and there are not yet official plans to close the park. Still, a DOJ lawyer asserted, when pressed by the judge, that Trump’s statements are not incorrect but can be compared to executive orders that are then interpreted by agencies in ways that are consistent with the law. (On Truth Social, Trump also added that “any variance or changes will be made, depending on site conditions, by the Experts in Parks and Recreation, whose experience and knowledge in Seawalls, Landscaping, and Design are second to none.”)

If this seems confusing, that’s because it is. In a summer hearing for the case, Reyes likened the government’s stance to Schrodinger’s cat. Trump’s golf course is somehow simultaneously being built and not being built. Yesterday’s hearings captured the absurdity of the situation and the acrobatics the government seemingly must perform to defend a president who wants what he wants.

Trump has focused on renovation projects with an unprecedented intensity during his second term, working to put his stamp on the nation’s capital in arch, ballroom, and sculpture-garden form. The golf course is unique, though, in that it deals not with the widely known part of Washington’s monumental landscape but with a space people use in their everyday life.

The government has downplayed its golf-course efforts in court; in a filing on Sunday, DOJ lawyers likened the changes to East Potomac to redesigning “all the art exhibits in a Smithsonian Museum” and claimed that they’re relatively minor. Reyes didn’t buy that in court yesterday. Changing the layout of an entire historic golf course is not like changing exhibits, she said; it’s like tearing down an entire museum and building a new one.

The lawsuit has gotten heated at times. Government lawyers have tried and failed to have Reyes taken off the case, asserting in a court filing that “no reasonable observer could consider Judge Reyes sufficiently impartial to adjudicate this case.” Yesterday, she appeared especially careful, sustaining a number of objections from the government to her questions. After a more pointed exchange, she insisted that a government lawyer tell her whether she was yelling. The lawyer said that the question would be very difficult to answer.

Foreshadowing the government’s arguments, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wrote on X last week that “I missed the part of the Constitutional Convention that put federal judges in charge of golf-course maintenance.” (Reyes had not actually barred routine work on the course; rather, she’d requested notice of “major developments.”)

As the hearing wound down, Reyes noted that during the final break, she had received worried texts from her mother and brother about reported death threats against her. Then she, like Miller, invoked the early days of the republic. A federal judge receiving threats over a golf course, she said, is probably not what the Founding Fathers envisioned.

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. 

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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, a landscape 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.