‘We’re gutted’: They planned to revive this D.C. muni. President Trump has other plans  

Washington, D.C., has three 18-hole public courses, and Donald Trump flies over one of them in Marine One on a regular basis, the Blue Course at the East Potomac Golf Links, a Walter Travis layout that has been a mainstay for everyman golfers in the nation’s capital for nearly a century.

For the past half-decade, a group of golfing do-gooders, doing their not-for-profit business as the National Links Trust, has been methodically raising money and pulling on an endless spool of red tape in the name of rehabilitating these three courses: Rock Creek, Langston and East Potomac. They were proceeding in that order as the East Potomac facility, run down though it is, is more than breaking even, the Rock Creek course has been on a death watch for years and the Langston course is somewhere in between. Doctors go where the bleeding is.

That was then. 

In an interview on Monday, the two founders of the National Links Trust said that Trump, aided and abetted by Department of the Interior officials and his own golf interest, are planning to step in and push the NLT team out, as was first reported by the Wall Street Journal late last week. (The properties are owned, essentially, by the National Park Service, an agency of the Department of the Interior.) With 45 years left on it, the National Links Trust’s 50-year lease on the three properties will be terminated, the co-founders, Will Smith and Mike McCartin, said. NLT had expected that Tom Doak would do a tee-to-green, keep-it-simple renovation of the Blue Course on a pro bono basis, just as Gil Hanse is currently doing at Rock Creek and Beau Welling is on board to do at Langston. They now expect that Tom Fazio, one of Trump’s go-to course architects for his golf properties, will get the job.

“We’re gutted, just gutted,” Smith said on Monday. “We believe that golf in and of itself is a public good, that golf teaches a lot of great golf values,” Smith said, and the group was taking its cues from that sentiment. If you know Trump’s golf values, they are very different, as his courses are dramatic and showy, often with tall waterfalls, perfect cart paths and delectable hot dogs at the turn.

Smith and McCartin, by contrast, wanted the Blue Course to be what it has always been, a user-friendly course with modest green fees but, in its future, new-and-improved state, a course with more interesting topography and design features, unencumbered views of the Potomac River and healthier grasses throughout. As they understand it, Trump, working with Fazio, will want a course with lakes and mounds that is suitable for tournament play. It is an easy prediction to make because that is a broad description of most Trump courses. “We didn’t have any desire to make it expensive and fancy,” Smith said. In golf, as in other matters, expensive and fancy is Trump’s stock in trade. As Trump told the Journal, “I think what we’re looking to do is just build something different, and build them in government.”

You know the head-snapping speed with which Trump oversaw the demolition of the East Wing of the White House and approved a first and now a second set of plans for the construction of lavish ballrooms in its place? “I think they are looking to do the exact same thing” at East Potomac, Smith said, in terms of speed and decisiveness, with little, if any, input from the public. 

A text message and phone call to a Department of Interior official, William Doffermyre, who is familiar with Trump’s thinking about the project, was not returned. Neither was a text message to Tom Fazio or an email interview request to the White House press office. Last week, Fazio told GOLF.com that he had had a two-hour lunch with Trump in the White House in November. He was not asked about his potential involvement in working on the Blue Course then but did note Trump’s pride in taking dirt from the East Wing project and dumping it behind a chain-link fence on the East Potomac golf property. “He’s a construction guy,” Fazio said.

The National Links Trust has anticipated getting pushed out for several months now, as Trump began showing interest in the Blue Course in early August. Smith and McCartin believe, based on what administration officials and others have told them, that their lease will be terminated because they did not reach certain stated goals by certain dates. If that is true, the men said, it is only because they are working, as McCartin said, “by the book,” including dozens of community and agency presentations, getting environmental assessments and approvals from the Commission of Fine Arts, the National Capital Planning Commission and the Office of Historic Preservation. Any observer of Trump knows he’s a big-picture guy, drawn to big messages and big themes. Golf course work on federal land is a painstaking process, or it can be.

There is no obvious template for what the National Links Trust had hoped to do. Many active golfers are familiar with the major renovation projects at Harding Park in San Francisco, The Park in West Palm Beach and Cobbs Creek in Philadelphia. Smith and McCartin said those projects are not models for their vision for the Blue Course. “When you design a course with a $250 green fee for visitor play and $50 for locals, it still has to fulfill the expectations of the golfer paying $250,” Smith said. In other words, something spectacular, in design, ambience and amenities. McCartin grew up playing the Blue Course. He would like golfers there to experience what he experienced: good, no-fuss golf at an affordable price. 

“We went through the hard work of establishing why this work is, on balance, a public good,” Smith said. “We are saying, here is what our project is, here’s what the impact is going to be on you. What the president is doing is to set himself up to circumvent the public-engagement process.

“We’re expecting a termination letter,” Smith said.

The National Links Trust has several powerful and accomplished lawyers helping it on a pro bono basis. The Department of Interior has 200 lawyers in D.C. alone.

“We’re having our holiday party tonight,” Smith said Monday afternoon. He received an annual stipend of $50,000 for his NLT work, most of which he donated to the trust, he said. “We’re going to go out with a bang.”

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com