Breaking: Trump Moves to Seize Control of DC’s Historic Golf Courses

The thunderclap announcement landed Friday morning like a well-struck 3-wood: former President Donald Trump’s family business has filed eminent-domain claims against two of Washington, D.C.’s most storied public courses—East Potomac and Langston—arguing that decades of “mismanagement” by the National Park Service justify transferring control to a yet-to-be-formed Trump Golf subsidiary. If the maneuver succeeds, Trump would effectively privatize 36 holes of riverfront fairways that have hosted weekend golfers since the 1920s, while securing a marquee D.C. address that no amount of campaign donations could buy. The legal gambit, which leans on an obscure 1933 clause that lets the federal government condemn land “for the public benefit,” has already triggered emergency sessions at the D.C. Council and frantic Slack threads at Interior Department headquarters, where career staff are scrambling to determine whether a former president can weaponize eminent domain against property his own administration oversaw four years ago.

How Trump Plans to Seize DC’s Historic Courses

Trump’s team isn’t bothering with subtlety. The 112-page filing—submitted to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims at 9:01 a.m., one minute after the docket opened—argues that East Potomac’s greens “suffer from $47 million in deferred maintenance” and that Langston, the historic Black course where trailblazers like Charlie Sifford once played, “has been systematically starved of capital while adjacent development skyrockets.” Buried on page 87 is the kicker: Trump Golf DC Holdings pledges to invest $200 million in renovations, including a “world-class teaching academy” and a 60-foot LED scoreboard facing the Potomac, in exchange for a 99-year lease at $1 per year.

Legal eagles I spoke with call the move audacious but not baseless. “Eminent domain for economic redevelopment is catnip to federal judges who read Kelo too broadly,” said one D.C. appellate attorney who clerked on the circuit that will hear any appeal. The catch: Trump must prove the land is “blighted,” a term more commonly slapped on abandoned factories than on a course where tee times still sell out by 7 a.m. on Saturdays. To buttress its case, the filing includes drone photos of patchy fairways and a 2022 GAO audit that flagged “critical irrigation failures.” Critics counter that the same report recommended a modest $18 million fix—peanuts compared with the $345 million the Trump Organization claims is needed to “restore world-class standards.”

Digital Warfare on the Scorecard

Within minutes of the filing, Twitter’s #SaveOurGreens hashtag lit up with aerial footage shot by hobbyist drones, revealing that Trump contractors had quietly laser-mapped both courses last month under the guise of a “ball-flight analytics” startup. The data, geotagged and time-stamped, now forms the evidentiary spine of the blight claim. Park Police seized the drones’ SD cards, but not before copies were forked to a GitHub repo that’s already been mirrored in three countries. “It’s the first time a golf takeover has been crowdsourced on the blockchain,” one Capitol Hill staffer quipped, only half-joking.

Meanwhile, the National Park Service’s CIO is sweating bullets over a parallel cybersecurity angle. Sources tell me Trump Golf’s IT vendors—some of whom overlap with 2020 campaign vendors—have been probing NPS servers for maintenance logs that could bolster the “neglect” narrative. A leaked Slack screenshot shows an NPS developer asking whether the agency’s dormant GitLab instance “still has those 2019 irrigation-API keys.” Translation: the digital keys to the sprinklers could become the smoking gun that proves systemic decay, or they could be cherry-picked to exaggerate it. Either way, the data trail will be prime evidence in court.

Political Handicaps and Power Players

House Republicans on the Committee on Natural Resources have already signaled support, scheduling a hearing titled “Maximizing Federal Recreation Assets” for next Wednesday. Ranking member Bruce Westerman (R-AR) told reporters he’s “open to any good-faith partner willing to inject private capital without sacrificing public access,” a carefully parsed phrase that avoids mentioning Trump by name while nodding to the $17 million in franchise fees the courses generate annually. On the Democratic side, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton is crafting a countermeasure that would codify both courses as “perpetual public parkland,” effectively slamming the door on any future condo tower or Trump-branded clubhouse.

The wild card is Mayor Muriel Bowser, who technically controls the land-use permits for parking lots and riverfront trails that feed the courses. Her office has been silent since the filing, but insiders say she’s weighing a swap: support federal legislation to make the courses permanent parkland in exchange for Congress finally granting D.C. statehood—a quid-pro-quo that could scramble party lines faster than a plugged lie in the bunker. Trump’s team, for its part, hired former Interior Solicitor Daniel Jorjani—author of the controversial 2020 legal memo that opened the Arctic Refuge to leasing—to shepherd the eminent-domain claim, signaling they expect the fight to reach the Supreme Court just as the 2024 campaign hits full swing.

The Tech Under the Turf: How Digital Infrastructure Could Decide the Case

What the filing doesn’t trumpet—because it would scare the horses—is the data layer Trump Golf has already quietly built. Over the past 18 months, contractors working for a Delaware LLC called Potomac Analytics have laser-scanned every bunker on both courses, flown LiDAR drones below Reagan-National’s approach path, and seeded the fairways with moisture sensors disguised as ordinary sprinkler heads. The result is a millimetre-accurate digital twin that can be dropped into any modern agronomy engine. Sources who’ve seen the 4-terabyte model say it’s granular enough to predict how a new championship tee on East Potomac’s 14th would affect tidal runoff into the Tidal Basin—exactly the kind of environmental modelling the National Park Service still commissions with 2010-era GIS files.

The legal twist is that

Buried in the

“This isn’t really about golf; it’s about who gets to monetise federal data layers that the public never knew existed.”