President Donald Trump mused Thursday about turning D.C.’s national parks into golf clubs while meeting with police and military personnel at his war-on-crime spectacle in the capital.
“One of the things we are going to be redoing is your parks,” the president said as he spoke from the U.S. Park Police’s Anacostia Operations Facility in Washington, D.C. “I’m very good at grass because I have a lot of golf courses all over the place. I know more about grass than any human being I think anywhere in the world.”
Trump’s credentials on turf are indeed considerable, having built 19 golf courses across the globe, according to the Trump Organization.
Although Trump announced earlier in the day that he’d go out on patrols with police and the National Guard, he instead brought pizza and hamburgers for them before returning to the White House. Mandel Ngan/Getty Images
“We’re going to be re-grassing all your parks, all brand new sprinkler systems, the best that you can buy,” the self-proclaimed turf whisperer continued. “It’ll look like… Trump National Golf Club.”
Trump, 79, then preached to law enforcement personnel with a philosophical rumination on the parallels between humans and grass.
“Grass has a life. You know that? Grass has a life. We have a life, and grass has a life,” he said. “The grass here died about 40 years ago.”
The Lincoln Memorial and World War II Memorial sit within one of the national parks Trump wants to spruce up. Kevin Carter/Getty Images
The elderly president has been unusually contemplative lately, calling into Fox & Friends Tuesday to say, “I want to get to heaven if possible. I’m hearing [that] I’m not doing well. I hear I’m at the bottom of the totem pole.”
Speaking to law enforcement Thursday, he told them, “We’re going to be rebuilding all of your parks and it’s gonna happen fast, it’s gonna go up like a miracle, so you do the job on safety and I’ll get this place fixed up physically.”
There are more than 30 national parks located in D.C., including the White House and President’s Park and the Smithsonian Ground, that are maintained by the National Park Service.
The agency is organized under the Department of the Interior, headed by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who stood quietly next to Trump during his botanical reflections before lighting up as the president praised him as a “popular guy.”
Although Trump announced earlier in the day that he would go out on patrols with police and the National Guard, he instead brought pizza and hamburgers for them before returning to the White House after less than an hour.
