Donald Trump started his Monday with a golf course on his mind and a federal judge in his crosshairs. By lunchtime, that judge was using his own lawyers’ words to pick his story apart.
The fight is over East Potomac Golf Links, a 106-year-old public course in Washington, D.C., that Trump wants to turn into a championship venue.
Local golfers and preservationists have spent months trying to stop him, and the judge overseeing their lawsuit is tired of Trump’s surprises.
Monday’s showdown was the ugliest round yet.
It opened with a pre-dawn post and spilled into a heated courtroom face-off with one of the Justice Department’s top officials over a filing that seemed to contradict nearly everything Trump told the public.
The DC Preservation League and two golfers sued the Interior Department in February, arguing the overhaul violates the 1897 congressional act that created East Potomac Park, according to The Associated Press.
The case landed with U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee who has repeatedly warned the administration not to get ahead of the court.
The government did it anyway. Over the Oct. 10 holiday weekend, crews cut down roughly 430 trees on the course with less than a day’s notice. Reyes froze any further cutting until at least Oct. 26, and the Justice Department hit back by asking her to step off the case, accusing her of bias.
Then Trump showed his hand.
On Sunday, he announced the course would close Nov. 15 for roughly 15 months of construction. Reyes ordered the government to tell her by that evening whether it still claimed the redesign was merely preliminary, Raw Story reported.
Late Sunday, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the Justice Department’s third-ranking official, replied that “the plan is not final because the Park Service has not completed its review.”
Reyes, meanwhile, rejected the bid to remove her as baseless.
Trump apparently didn’t get the memo. Just after 6 a.m. Monday, he insisted on Truth Social that Interior wants to turn “a terrible and very unsafe golf course” into something “great, safe, and prestigious.”
He called Reyes “a crazed lunatic whose courthouse tapes will reveal, may be insane?” and declared that work “is scheduled to begin IMMEDIATELY!”
The plaintiffs flagged the post to the court shortly before the hearing.
Reyes went straight at Woodward, demanding to know which other DOJ lawyers in the room would sign his filing under Rule 11, which makes attorneys personally vouch for what they submit. Woodward called the request inappropriate and told his colleagues not to answer.
“I’m giving them a direct order,” Reyes shot back, before giving Woodward until 3 p.m. to explain in writing why they shouldn’t have to comply. Politico reports Reyes subsequently dropped the Rule 11 demand.
“I don’t know what to do, when I keep getting different stories,” Reyes told Woodward, according to CNN, later adding that the president himself told Americans a final plan existed.
Interior deputy chief of staff Greg Wischer and acting National Park Service director Jessica Bowron testified they learned about the 2019 park report used to justify the tree-cutting only in September.
Reyes wasn’t buying it. “There is no universe in which all of this coincidentally happened all at the same time,” she said.
Trump kept talking anyway. Speaking with reporters later Monday, he called the existing course “old, tired, beaten up” and “useless,” promising Washington “a better golf course.”
But he didn’t stop there. He returned to Truth Social later that evening, around 11 p.m., and continued rambling.
“Trash Island,’ Washington, D.C., the nickname for the broken and dilapidated Golf Course that is the subject of frivolous litigation in the United States Court System, before a judge that seems not to want Greatness for our Capital or our Nation (but who knows?), has been badly managed for so many decades that it is a completely nonviable and unsafe Project.”
Trump spent the wee hours of the morning sharing photos of trash and debris on the golf course to prove it’s unsafe.
On social media, specifically on X, people questioned his priorities, noting, “Just when you think he can’t be more insane.”
Another reminded him, “He calls it trash Island because that’s where they dumped all the demolition debris from the East Wing.”
Someone else added, “He doesn’t like to follow the rules. He also doesn’t like to be told he needs to ask for permission to spend millions of taxpayers dollars.”
One more commenter wrote, “It’s not a great look for Trump to be spending time on more vanity construction projects right now.”
East Potomac has been a sore spot for months. Back in May, Reyes warned of “serious consequences” if major work started without notifying the court. By late August, freshly cut stumps sparked outrage after crews removed dozens of trees, including a cherry tree, from the historic park.
People also fear the course could go the way of the White House East Wing, which Trump bulldozed last year to make room for his ballroom.
For now, the remaining trees stay standing through at least Oct. 26 while Reyes weighs a longer-term order. Whether Trump’s Nov. 15 closure happens may depend less on his early-morning posts and more on whether his own lawyers can keep their stories straight.
🚨 UPDATE: President Trump just DROPPED these decrepit photos of the DC golf course that activist Judge Ana Reyes is trying to PERSONALLY block renovations and beautification for "Collapsing Sea Wall — Very dangerous to one’s health!" 💯 "Here are pictures of Trash Island for the Judge to study!" Reyes has NOTHING better to do than stop Trump’s team from making a public golf course beautiful again. Reyes, a Biden appointee, has frozen the project with a restraining order through at least October 26 A crumbling sea wall and piles of trash in the nation’s capital, and a judge wants to keep it that way! IGNORE HER
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) October 20, 2026
