hello, our country is going down the tubes and he wants to upgrade golf courses???
Can we get grandpa another hobby, like health care for all.
— Alana (@alana807.bsky.social) Dec 13, 2025 at 3:58 PM
The most intense focus of Trump and the Interior Department seems to be East Potomac Golf Links, the famed course located just south of the White House along the river itself, with each hole offering direct sightlines to the Washington Monument. The 36-hole facility is the closest golf course in terms of proximity to the White House, so it’s only natural Trump would assume this means he should fully possess every aspect of it. Its signature course is the Blue Course, which dates back to 1918. In recent years, said course has suffered from drainage problems and has a seawall reportedly in need of extensive repair. These were presumably all items on the National Links Trust to-do list in what was supposed to be a half century contract … which the Trump administration is now claiming must be addressed by “the end of the month” in order to ward off seizure. This seems like a clear Herculean task that the operators are intended to fail, which would hand the Trump administration access to a highly valued strip of real estate along the Potomac. Surely the President has only the best of intentions here, to serve the D.C. public.
The National Links Trust seems to have known for a while that Trump has been predatorily eyeing the courses. In what is easily my favorite detail of this story, the organization apparently presented the administration with a proposal recently in which they extremely clearly and pathetically attempted to tee up a grand groveling operation to the President, involving all his favorite things, from a dumb title to the idea of putting Trump on a board alongside prominent golf celebrities. The “Make DC Golf Great Again” proposal (*gag*) would have included a “special oversight board” chaired by Trump, and would likewise have included former PGA of America CEO Seth Waugh, Augusta National Golf Club Chairman Fred Ridley, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan, and none other than freaking Tiger Woods himself. It seems that this last-ditch attempt to appeal to Trump’s ego, smart though it may have been, was probably too little, too late.
Regardless, if the folks at National Links Trust didn’t think the writing was on the wall, they probably should have realized it when dirt and debris from the recently bulldozed historic East Wing of the White House began being literally dumped between the sixth and ninth holes of East Potomac’s Blue Course, which is exactly what recently happened. You know, the same course that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told WSJ was in “total disrepair,” saying that only the President’s immediate intervention would bring it “back to what it was originally envisioned to be, which is the finest municipal golf in the country, right here in our capital.”
Trump’s actual intentions for these spaces, particularly East Potomac, are unknown, but you can bet that there will ultimately be some kind of financial benefit at the end of the day. In the course of his second term, initiation fees at Trump’s private golf clubs and country clubs have skyrocketed around the country: The initiation feed at his Bedminster, NJ club went from $75,000 to $125,000, and some members have apparently paid up to $350,000 according to the Daily Mail. Mar-a-Lago memberships in Florida have likewise become a trendy way to throw money at the President for preferential treatment, and now cost up to $1 million. Even Donald Trump Jr. has a recently launched “private membership club” in D.C. called Executive Branch, which has a membership fee of merely $500,000.
Or maybe Trump is just tired of making a 40-minute drive to his own Trump National Golf Club Washington D.C. in Potomac Falls, Virginia, when he could be rolling only a few minutes away to hit the links at East Potomac. Perhaps this would even save him enough time that he could focus on something like millions of Americans about to lose health care in the next month? Or maybe he’ll just squeeze in a few more rounds.
