A D.C. judge has demanded Donald Trump immediately explain himself over plans to renovate one of the capital’s busiest golf courses in honor of his favorite president.
District Judge Ana Reyes granted an emergency motion late Sunday night requiring the Justice Department to respond to a legal complaint over the plans before 7.30 a.m. Monday, with a hearing to be held just half an hour after that, according to an X post from Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney.
D.C. Preservation League, a nonprofit set up to preserve the capital’s historic sites, filed the motion Sunday afternoon after NOTUS reported Friday that the National Park Service was planning to close the East Potomac Golf Course so that work could begin on the site.
The White House had prior to that point insisted no plans had been finalized “regarding the nature and scope of the renovations,” the New York Times reports.
Skye Perryman, CEO and President of Democracy Forward, which is representing the D.C. Preservation League in court, told the newspaper her organization had filed the emergency motion “to save this important part of our national park system from being another casualty of a reckless administration.”
“Despite attestations to the court, the Trump-Vance administration appears to be moving forward aggressively to shut down D.C.’s largest public golf course to explore another of the president’s pet projects to benefit himself,” she said.
It remains unclear at this stage what exactly the work at the East Potomac Golf Course may entail. NOTUS reported the National Park Service was scheduled to begin landscaping and clearing trees as the president develops his redesign of the site.
Trump’s push to begin work on the course also comes as Meredith O’Rourke, one of his leading fundraisers, solicits contributions for an ambitious transformation of sections of the D.C. waterfront.
Those plans are understood to include a newly designed “championship” golf course and a National Garden of American Heroes, according to the Washington Post.
The proposed redevelopment would extend beyond the golf course to include West Potomac Park, a federally owned stretch along the National Mall currently used for sports, leisure, and public gatherings.
The newly formed National Garden of American Heroes Foundation says the planned garden aims to celebrate “hundreds of historically significant Americans,” prompting concerns about how much of the area would actually remain open for general use.
Roughly 250 individuals have been proposed for inclusion as life-size statues, among them controversial picks like Christopher Columbus—who was not, in fact, an American. The cost of the statues alone could exceed the $40 million already allocated.
It comes as Trump seeks to remodel a number of prominent public sites across the nation’s capital in his own image—most controversially, with his demolition of the White House East Wing to make way for an immense ballroom set to dwarf the existing structure.
The D.C. Preservation League is understood to have first filed proceedings against the golf course plans after waste materials from the East Wing construction site were dumped on the East Potomac grounds.
Trump is not understood to have offered an explanation for why the debris was moved to the site. Lawyers behind the suit claim the materials included lead, arsenic and substances known to cause cancer.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
