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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. 

[Read: The capital is a mess]

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.

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Most of Donald Trump’s efforts to control the nation’s largest museum complex have been loud. He tried to fire a Smithsonian museum director on social media, ordered the placement of warning signs outside its American-history museum, and demanded that the museum take down a modernist sculpture he dislikes. But while this political theater plays out publicly, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget is quietly using an obscure funding power as part of its campaign to influence how the Smithsonian tells the American story.

Late last month, according to previously unreported public records, OMB included a footnote in two recent apportionments of federal funds that conditions nearly $190 million for the Smithsonian on the institution’s compliance with Trump’s March 2025 executive order accusing it of spreading “divisive narratives.” Essentially, the White House is trying to force adherence to its preferred version of history through a little-known but legally binding budget mechanism.

The fiscal-year-2027 footnote, which applies to funds carried over from last year in two of the Smithsonian’s main salaries and expenses accounts, reads:

To the extent permitted by law, amounts apportioned shall be available for obligation in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253 (March 27, 2025), “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

That executive order marked the beginning of the Trump administration’s campaign to change the Smithsonian, alleging that the institution had come “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and prohibiting “expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.” The footnote does not specify how the Smithsonian should apply the order’s vague prohibition. But it is more than simply a threat: Apportionment footnotes are enforceable under the Antideficiency Act, the violation of which can carry criminal penalties. Such footnotes are one of several tactics that the Trump administration has used to try to supplant Congress’s spending power. In this case, the footnote suggests that the fight over the Smithsonian’s purpose goes much deeper than Trump’s most visible attacks.

Today, the Smithsonian is nearly two-thirds federally funded and receives an annual total appropriation of about $1 billion—a reality that would have agonized some of its earliest supporters. In a way, John Quincy Adams could be said to have foreseen what Trump is trying to do to the Smithsonian: In 1842, the former president, then serving in Congress, opposed a bill providing federal funds to the Smithsonian, writing that the new institution in Washington, D.C., should be “exclusively confined to itself and not entangled or commingled with any national establishment requiring appropriations of public money.” Even Joseph Henry, the first Smithsonian secretary, under whom the institution began receiving regular federal funding to support a museum, worried about it, writing in an 1877 letter that the museum was “liable to be brought under direct political influence.” If there is any constant in American life, Adams and Henry knew it then and Trump knows it now: Money is control.

Although the Trump administration has notched only small wins against the Smithsonian, it’s been playing money games since last year with an institution that is meant to operate independently. Starting in September of last year, OMB began adding footnotes demanding that the Smithsonian comply with two documents: the March executive order and an August letter to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch insisting that exhibition materials and other documents be turned over for a content review. Then, starting in April of this year, the footnote was revised to require the Smithsonian to follow Trump’s budget request rather than the 2026 appropriations bill Congress had passed—essentially telling the Smithsonian to operate at a $89 million deficit from what lawmakers had legislated. After several iterations, that footnote was ultimately removed on July 2. Two days later, the White House issued a scathing report on the National Museum of American History. At that point, the footnotes tactic seemed to have gone dormant. Until late last month.

It is unclear whether the footnotes have had any concrete impacts on the Smithsonian’s operations. The Smithsonian declined a request for an interview about the footnotes and the White House did not answer questions about the matter.

Representative Chellie Pingree, a Maine Democrat who is the ranking member on the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Smithsonian, told me she spoke with Bunch this summer about the funding issues and got the sense that the institution was waiting to push back until the footnotes really interfered with its work. The footnotes were never challenged, she said. “I think they caused enormous heartburn for the Smithsonian. Eventually, the funds were released, and so now my worry has turned to what will happen on the next round.” Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who is also the minority leader on a subcommittee tasked with Smithsonian oversight, condemned what he described as the refusal to release tens of millions of dollars earlier this year. “OMB used small footnotes to make a huge, absurd assertion that holding funding to the President’s budget level—just a number on a piece of paper—overrode the actual law,” he wrote to me. “In fact, it is illegal to withhold such funding.”

Multiple budget experts told me these footnotes are very strange. Cerin Lindgrensavage, a lawyer at the nonpartisan watchdog group Protect Democracy, has been following apportionments closely and told me that the Smithsonian footnotes were so bespoke that a tracker that her organization had made did not flag them. “It never occurred to us that somebody would put something so egregious in text,” she said. In particular, “the idea that you would resurrect the president’s request that has zero force of law from an earlier part of the appropriations process and impose it at the very end is abhorrent to the rule of law and the constitutional order as we know it,” she said.

[Read: The next change Trump has planned for the Smithsonian]

This context makes Trump’s 2027 budget request even more ominous for the Smithsonian, because it’s the lowest for the institution in years. At $961.3 million, Trump’s proposal cuts spending by about 11 percent from the previous year. The request also stresses the importance of maintaining and protecting museums on the National Mall, which is home to about half of the Smithsonian’s museums and ground zero for Trump’s pet projects in Washington.

The White House has used footnotes against other federal entities, including the National Science Foundation. Last month, a judge ruled against the Trump administration in a case about Education Department apportionments, writing that the government’s use of restrictive footnotes to force compliance with executive orders in this situation was unlawful. Remaining claims in the case, including those related to OMB using apportionments to withhold money from specific programs the administration doesn’t like, are pending. (Lindgrensavage is one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers.)

Little attention has been paid to these behind-the-scenes tensions at the Smithsonian, except for when The Washington Sun reported on some of the footnotes earlier this year. The White House has justified its broader campaign by claiming that the Smithsonian presents an overly negative version of U.S. history and that its leadership has a political agenda. Historians have decried the Trump administration’s attempt to influence the institution, and Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation to protect the Smithsonian’s independence. Smithsonian leadership has occasionally pushed back against the administration’s wider claims, saying its work is nonpartisan and rooted in scholarship. But the face-off coincides with an ongoing debate over how to tell American history. Should it be one overarching narrative or comprise many smaller, varied perspectives? Should it focus on national unity or diversity? These questions are especially top of mind at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which is widely seen as measured in its work and has followed larger curatorial and academic trends of widening the historical narrative to include more groups while emphasizing the complexities of the American story.

Whatever the approach, history at the Smithsonian has been the responsibility of curators, not presidents. But the Smithsonian is in a particularly vulnerable period. Bunch will retire from his post at the end of the year. Citizen members keep dropping off the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents when their terms expire, and their seats are going unfilled, reportedly because the White House is trying to influence the new picks, The New York Times wrote this summer. Museum-director positions are open across the institution too—last week, the director of the National Museum of Natural History announced that he is stepping down—adding to a number of major vacancies. For a president seeking control, a power vacuum and a fraying institution could represent an opportunity.

One staffer who requested anonymity because she was not authorized to speak on the record told me after Bunch’s retirement announcement that some employees worried that the president might attempt to appoint a secretary, just as he “fired” National Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet in a Truth Social post last year. (The Smithsonian said Trump did not have the authority to do that, but she ultimately stepped down anyway). “I think you’d have to really stick your head in the sand to not feel some level of anxiety around this,” the staffer said. In a sense, the White House’s efforts have already worked simply by placing an entire museum system on edge.

It has a lot to lose. At the Smithsonian, private money goes toward the glossier endeavors, such as groundbreaking exhibitions and new facilities, while public money is typically used for basic needs, such as operations, conservation of national collections, and maintenance. Public funding keeps the doors open, which is why the institution’s unusual status as a private-public entity is most visible when it has to close during a government shutdown, as happened last year.

The footnote tactic exploits that vulnerability. Although the apportionment process was designed to help prevent entities receiving federal dollars from overspending, it is “not an invitation to the Office of Management and Budget to micromanage the federal government,” Lindgrensavage said. The Trump administration has tested the limits of its apportionment authority. More recently, the president has called for a sweeping cancellation of about $810 million in federal dollars, much of it coming out of resources for “refugees, asylees, and other non-citizens,” according to a White House memo. Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, posted on X that OMB was trying “to undermine Congress’s Constitutional power of the purse.”

Budgeting experts stressed to me that every line of a footnote is intentional and has a story behind it. In the Smithsonian’s case, the footnotes go into very specific detail. In the version of the footnote that OMB added this spring, the office proposed imposing travel restrictions on the Smithsonian, with exceptions for two projects that Trump is fond of: the semiquincentennial festivities and the Arabian leopards at the National Zoo (which are supported by a gift from Saudi Arabia). In 1839, Adams wrote that he feared a Smithsonian bequest might be “squandered upon cormorants,” referring to voracious birds. Adams was prescient in his anxieties about the Smithsonian’s financial entanglements; he just had the wrong animal. Instead, the Smithsonian’s main antagonist is a devotee of big cats.