President Donald Trump wants to renovate a local golf course on public land in his own image and tastes. To do so, he will need to clear an indeterminate number of trees from the landscape. A federal court asked the Justice Department—and, by extension, the executive branch—to provide notice before making any major changes to the course.
This chain of events does not technically amount to defiance of a federal court order. Reyes did not issue one until the damage had already been done, and there is no sign as of yet that the Trump administration is ignoring or sidestepping it. It nonetheless represents a disturbing trend in which executive-branch officials treat lower federal courts, Congress, and the law itself as something to work around, avoid, and outright ignore rather than something to faithfully obey.
The 36-hole fairway has served as an affordable course for the capitol’s middle-class golfers, in sharp contrast to the tonied and exclusive golf clubs that ring D.C. in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. It also played a modest role in the desegregation of public spaces in D.C. when, in 1941, three Black golfers played on the course to jeers from white golfers and under the protection of federal park police.
Initially, litigants asked for a temporary restraining order that would prevent the administration from making major changes to the golf course while litigation continued. But the Justice Department assured Judge Ana Reyes that this wasn’t necessary. “Instead of entering injunctive relief, the Court agreed to accept the Government’s repeated assurances that it would notify Plaintiffs and the Court of any major developments at the Course outside of ordinary maintenance,” she said in Tuesday’s opinion.
This drew some concern from the plaintiffs, but Reyes again demurred on setting hard limits on the administration’s actions. “If we get bulldozers on site and they start mowing down half the golf course, ... that’s irretrievable, which is why the one thing I have done is ask them not to do that before giving us all notice,” she said during a hearing later in July.
Even after the National Park Service began removing dead and dying trees the following month, Reyes did not act. But she indicated to the lawyers that removing healthy, living trees would be altogether different—a red line of sorts, though she did not use those words. “The Court has given the Government ‘the benefit of the doubt’ that it would not ‘act first and ask forgiveness later,’” she wrote in Tuesday’s order, quoting from her earlier comment in litigation. “The Government then did precisely what Plaintiffs feared.”
The Trump administration, for its part, insists that it is merely implementing a “Cultural Landscape Report” that was drafted and published in 2019. Trump’s personal and public demands, in their telling, have almost nothing to do with the sudden defoliation of the East Potomac Golf Course. “It is a coincidence, the Government seems to suggest, that DOI cut down hundreds of trees at the Course weeks after the President asked DOI to cut down trees at the Course, and not, say, any other time in the last seven years,” Reyes observed.
As important as these outcomes are, it also matters how Trump and his underlings reached them. The administration’s apparent strategy on multiple fronts is to break the law and then make it substantively impossible for a court to address or remedy the damage. This has been most visible in immigration cases, where ICE has alternatively slow-walked or defied court orders in countless cases. It has also operated in ways that make litigation against them difficult, if not impossible.
Now that hostility for the rule of law is bleeding into the rest of the federal government, with dire consequences for democratic governance. By recklessly ignoring federal law as written by Congress, the Trump administration has accumulated more power for itself by turning Trump’s executive orders and personal instructions into the ersatz United States Code. By treating federal judicial orders as optional, the White House and its subordinates have gravely damaged those courts’ authority.
The Trump administration may find all of these concerns to be tedious and pointless. They may simply regard federal public property as Trump’s personal property, as if he had acquired the United States itself in a leveraged buyout on Election Night in 2024. Trumpworld may tire of liberal judges and lawmakers standing in the way of Trump from carrying out what they regard as the sovereign will of the American people. They would be mistaken to think this way. The American constitutional order grew over the course of centuries, watered by generations who hoped its canopy would cover future generations as well. Trump’s allies can hack at its roots today, but they will miss its shade tomorrow.
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