They rescued D.C.’s munys. Then Trump took over. Inside the fight between the president and public golf

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Dwayne Robinson swirls a coffee that has long gone cold, talking about work that was done for a future that no longer belongs to him.

He leans against the worn stone façade of the maintenance shed at Langston Golf Course, nodding toward the layout buried beneath a foot of hardened snow. The list comes slow and steady: replacing an irrigation system that quit years ago, sodding bare patches where grass gave up, expanding fairways and greens, adding TopTracer to the driving range. They knocked down overgrown vegetation that choked off playing angles and sightlines, revealing views of the Anacostia River and the National Arboretum that nobody playing the course had seen in decades. Realizing he could stand in the piercing air all morning cataloging the things that the National Links Trust has done, Robinson stops and offers something simpler.

“It’s finally green, man,” Robinson says. “All my life, it was a patch of brown. It was ours, the community loved it, but it’s all this place could be. Making it green? Like bringing out a butterfly that’s been in a cocoon for 100 years.”

An English setter prances over to Robinson’s feet, and he leans down to rub the dog’s ears. Not far behind is her owner, Tim Zurybida, the director of agronomy here, who greets Robinson with a pat on the shoulder. It was Zurybida who promoted Robinson from crew member to assistant superintendent last year, recognizing the hours, the labor, the way he carried this place on his chest. Robinson smiles but is quick to point out the hierarchy.

“I’m a newbie compared to them boys in the clubhouse,” Robinson says. “A lot of ‘em have been here since they were 7 and they’re in their 80s now. These older Black men, they were never allowed in a country club. This is their country club.”

Robinson’s voice fades as he and Zurybida turn, their faces hollowing when the conversation shifts from what they’ve built to what they’re about to lose. All because there is now a competing idea for what those courses could be—one of which is an exclusive, high-end resort that could potentially host professional tournaments—and that idea belongs to the ultimate arbiter: the president of the United States. “I think what we’re looking to do is just build something different, and build them in government,” Trump told reporters in December.

Over the last six months, President Trump and his administration have moved to seize control of three Washington, D.C. public golf courses from the National Links Trust, the non-profit that has managed Langston, Rock Creek and East Potomac since 2020. What is unfolding is, on its surface, a dispute over a lease. But it also involves the scope of executive power, whether public land means what it says, and if ordinary people have any claim to the places they’ve spent their lives building.

In response to a Golf Digest request to discuss the Trump administration’s involvement with the courses, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said, “President Trump promised to make D.C. safe and beautiful again for all its residents and visitors by removing violent criminals from the streets, cleaning up the parks and making long-overdue renovations to public lands. 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 public golf courses. The president and his extraordinary team will redevelop these decrepit golf courses in our nation’s capital to restore glamour and prestige.”

The Trump administration has already declared its verdict, and whether the Trust can overturn its fate remains uncertain at best. All long-term projects at the courses have been halted, some crew members have already left, and those who have stayed don’t know if their next paycheck will be their last. But quitting now means abandoning everything they’ve built, so Robinson and his crew are here on a February morning before dawn, putting a fresh coat of paint on out-of-bounds stakes for rounds that may never come.

Dwayne Robinson, assistant superintendent at Langston Golf Course.

Steve Boyle

East Potomac is home to the oldest mini-golf course in the nation. (National Links Trust)

Mike McCartin, one of the founders of the National Links Trust.

Steve Boyle

Langston, known as the Home of Black Golf in America.

Steve Boyle

Despite the snow East Potomac’s range was packed on a February morning.

Steve Boyle

A vision for all

When the National Park Service went looking for someone to rescue three of Washington, D.C.’s public golf courses in 2019—Langston, Rock Creek and East Potomac—most of the golf industry saw an opportunity. For Mike McCartin and Will Smith, it was an obligation.

McCartin had waited for the opportunity his entire career. He wrote his master’s thesis on East Potomac; not because it was convenient, but because he had grown up on it, learned the game on it, understood himself in relation to it and could not find a more urgent question than why a place like this was being allowed to die. Built on a man-made island in the shadow of the Washington Monument, East Potomac was Walter Travis’ democratic masterpiece, a 1920 design drawn from St. Andrews that logged 65,000 rounds its first season. William Flynn expanded it, and by the late 1920s the complex was drawing 155,000 rounds annually. A model so successful that public facilities soon followed in New York, Boston and Los Angeles—along with two other D.C. courses at Rock Creek and Langston—spawning America’s Golden Age of municipal golf.

But those D.C. courses were owned by the National Park Service, and golf was never its forte. Over the following century, the courses’ conditioning and care reflected that ignorance. McCartin spent a decade working alongside architect Tom Doak on some of the most celebrated courses in the world, building things that would outlast him. The whole time, East Potomac sat in the back of his mind like an unfinished sentence.

Smith had come up the same way, through Doak and then Gil Hanse. He and McCartin met in graduate school at the University of Georgia, studying landscape architecture and finding in each other the same unfashionable belief: that golf in America should be available to anyone willing to show up.

McCartin and Smith initially approached the Federal City Council, a D.C. economic development non-profit, to help carry the bid. It didn’t take long to understand they were in the wrong room. The council envisioned East Potomac as a high-priced, exclusive venue—the same story these courses had spent a century fighting. McCartin and Smith walked out and formed their own non-profit. They called it the National Links Trust, and they started making calls.

What came back surprised them. Doak signed on, pro bono. Hanse and his collaborator Jim Wagner did the same. Beau Welling, a senior consultant with Tiger Woods’ TGR Design, offered his time at a discount. Mike Keiser, who developed Bandon Dunes and Sand Valley, joined the advisory board and started raising money to keep green fees within reach. Troon Golf agreed to handle operations at a below market rate. What had started as two men and a conviction became an all-star team working largely on principle.

In June 2020, the National Links Trust won a 50-year lease on all three courses.

The multi-year “Nation’s Capital Project” assigned each course its own architect. Doak took East Potomac, with plans to restore Travis’ original reversible Blue Course, rebuilding two shorter nines, rehabbing the country’s oldest miniature golf course and modernizing the clubhouse. Hanse and Wagner took Rock Creek, honoring Flynn’s original intent with a new range and putting course woven through the park. Welling drew Langston, where the mandate wasn’t transformation but excavation—wider fairways, bigger greens, better drainage.

But architectural bones are only part of what makes these courses worth fighting for. They are a functioning portrait of what American public life is supposed to look like—congressmen and staffers alongside hourly-wage workers, country club gear sharing the tee sheet with jeans and sneakers. East Potomac’s driving range became a de facto happy hour for people who needed somewhere to decompress, for years one of D.C.’s most reliable spots for single people to meet. Different races, religions, nationalities and political parties, all sharing the same patch of ground, getting along in the way that cities always promise and rarely deliver.

There is a workforce program that funnels hundreds of high school kids into internships, preparing them for academic and professional life. At East Potomac and Langston, stray clubs and balls are always scattered near the ranges and putting greens—an unspoken offering to the city’s homeless, a chance for people down on their luck to lose themselves in the game, if only for a few minutes. On the East Potomac maintenance staff are men who were once freedom fighters, Afghans who risked everything to support American military operations, only to lose their homeland as the price of their loyalty.

“Whenever you’re feeling down about America, come to one of our courses,” says Chad Luebert, a former Marine and East Potomac starter. “One of the few places you’ll find in this city where no one is the same, everyone is having fun and the cause is greater than all of us.”

By the end of the Trust’s fifth season, rounds played and revenue had more than doubled. The Trust ran workforce development programs, expanded junior golf and brought in communities that the game had spent a century ignoring. “What sticks out to me was a Boys & Girls clinic,” says Trust executive director Damian Cosby. “I distinctly remember the first kid off the bus put his feet down, all wide-eyed: ‘I’ve never seen this much green grass in my life.’ Anything’s possible when people are given opportunity.”

The crew at East Potomac (Photos by Steve Boyle)

They had assembled the right people for the right reasons. What they hadn’t counted on was that none of that mattered to the National Park Service’s permitting office. The Trust assumed that a 50-year lease meant implicit permission to get the work started—that the proposal process had answered the fundamental questions and what remained was execution. What remained, it turned out, was everything.

Getting the National Park Service internally aligned took a full year before formal reviews could even begin. Then came NEPA compliance, Section 106 historic preservation consulting, the Commission of Fine Arts, the National Capital Planning Commission, the Endangered Species Act. Each agency had its own process, its own timeline, its own reasons to slow down. The courses sat on the National Register of Historic Places, which meant every significant change required a conversation with the past before it could have one with the future.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

“Every single person we ever dealt with at the Park Service was earnest about their job and wanting to help us,” McCartin says. “But earnest doesn’t move dirt.”

Rock Creek, projected to be finished by 2022, only became shovel-ready last fall. The delays weren’t negligence but the foreseeable consequence of a structure nobody had bothered to fix. They were a tenant on someone else’s land, dependent on the landlord to advocate for them.

Then, in spring 2025, an individual with White House access and a golfer’s handshake told them he could make all of the red tape go away.

Leverage

The man who had the power to end the Trust’s five years of waiting had spent those same years in rooms the Trust had never been allowed into. William Doffermyre, nominated as Solicitor of the Department of the Interior shortly after Trump retook the White House, was the department’s chief legal voice—and the man whose signature would be required on every NPS permit the Trust needed. Doffermyre was a former D.C. attorney and senior director at Energy Transfer, one of the country’s largest pipeline companies. He was an advisor to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. And, as it turned out, a golfer. (Doffermyre did not respond to requests for an interview.)

Through a mutual friend of McCartin and Smith, Doffermyre reached out to the Trust in late March 2025. “He said, ‘Look, if we can get this in front of the president, it would be really, really good. He can obviously help with fundraising,'” Smith recalls. “Doffermyre went on to explain that even if the president didn’t get on board, it was good for all of us to have a relationship, since he could expedite the process of what we were doing.” For a non-profit that had spent five years watching its timeline swallowed by regulatory compliance, the offer felt like oxygen. It wouldn’t take long to understand what they’d grabbed onto.

Over the ensuing months, multiple sources with knowledge of the situation—all requesting anonymity given the sensitivities around the White House—say Doffermyre’s behavior grew erratic. They described him as a “loose cannon,” someone who was “all over the place.” He began mining the Trust’s deep reservoir of golf industry contacts—conduct that leadership found odd at first and then unsettling as it implied that the Trust was no longer in control of the project. “He was presenting himself as the leader of everything we did,” one source says. “Suddenly, we had people reaching out to us going, ‘What is this guy talking about?’”

Doffermyre, sources say, started attaching the Trust’s logo to presentation decks and circulating them. One proposal, obtained by Golf Digest, landed in front of Bryson DeChambeau in summer 2025. It features the logo of the Crushers (DeChambeau’s LIV Golf team) alongside the USGA and PGA of America as potential partners, and a photo of DeChambeau and Trump trading fist-bumps.

The pattern was becoming legible: Doffermyre seemed less interested in preserving the Trust than in leveraging it. The project gave him proximity to Trump, who has built golf courses around the world and plays the game obsessively.

“Everything we did for the community, it was just currency to him,” one Trust source says. “And he was spending it freely.

“The conversations with him went from ‘I’m trying to help’ to ‘Go along with this, or else.’”

On Aug. 1, 2025, the or else arrived. Doffermyre and Burgum joined a White House meeting with President Trump, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and several advisors to discuss what they were calling the “America 250 Golf Project.” The plan would rename East Potomac “Washington National,” transform it into an 18-hole championship venue capable of hosting professional tournaments and break ground in July 2026 to coincide with the nation’s 250th anniversary. It was the kind of splashy, legacy-minded project that Trump gravitates toward: big number, big name, big ribbon.

Heading into that meeting, those with knowledge of the situation say Doffermyre’s intention was to keep the National Links Trust involved. Trump had a different idea, as he believed his administration could do it alone, and he pictured the course not necessarily as public but an exclusive, luxury spot. A new entity would be created to raise $75 million for East Potomac.

The National Links Trust wasn’t invited to the meeting but received a readout the next day from Doffermyre.

Hoping to salvage something, the Trust countered. On Oct. 20, it submitted a new proposal titled “Make DC Golf Great Again.” Under the plan, which Golf Digest has reviewed, East Potomac would become a 7,500-yard championship course alongside a shorter executive track, a driving range and a new clubhouse. Trump would have a leadership role, with an oversight board that’s a who’s who of American golf: Tiger Woods, Augusta National chairman Fred Ridley, former PGA of America CEO Seth Waugh, USGA president Fred Perpall and PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan. All three courses would remain affordable and accessible. The price tag was $150 million, and the Trust would continue to run everything.

Dirt and debris from the White House East Wing now sits on East Potomac Golf Course.

Steve Boyle

The Trump Administration never responded to the proposal.

Sources familiar with discussions at the White House told Golf Digest that the administration felt the proposal was an attempt to undercut its authority and reassert the Trust’s relevance in a conversation it had already been removed from. The Trust had misread the room. This was never a negotiation.

In his time as Governor of North Dakota and as Secretary of the Interior, Burgum has gained the political reputation as an enforcer for Trump. He ordered the stop-work pause on East Coast offshore wind projects (Trump has long had a personal distaste for wind power) and was integral in implementing the “Gulf of America” change. Days after the Trust sent the counter proposal, dump trucks began arriving at East Potomac. The Trump administration had demolished the East Wing of the White House during the fall and now needed a place to discard the debris. According to the Wall Street Journal, it was Burgum who suggested using the course as a dumping site.

If the message wasn’t clear enough, Doffermyre made it explicit. The following week, McCartin received a two-sentence Notice of Default:

The purpose of this letter is to provide National Links Trust (“NLT”) formal notice of default and intent to terminate NPS Lease# NCR-3060-19-001 for failure to make the Initial Improvements described in Exhibit D and Construction Documents in accordance with the schedules set forth therein. I look forward to continuing our discussions on this matter and sincerely hope we can find a mutually acceptable path forward in the days ahead.

Exhibit D is the 2020 document that established the original construction timeline. “Essentially,” McCartin says, “the very thing that was slowing us down with permitting is now being used to say we aren’t moving fast enough.” McCartin also points to outside forces slowing the project. Before any work can begin at East Potomac, the seawall guarding the park must be fully rebuilt to address significant drainage issues—yet that assignment falls to the park, not the NLT.

In November, East Potomac had an unexpected visitor. Tom Fazio, who has designed four Trump golf courses, toured the property under an alias. That same afternoon, according to public records, Fazio visited the White House, where he stayed for more than three hours. Fazio is now widely considered to oversee East Potomac’s renovation. Golf Digest has learned that Trump officials originally approached Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw to lead the East Potomac, but the pair declined, citing prior commitments.

President Donald Trump wants to turn East Potomac into a golf course that can host professional tournaments.

Andrew Harnik

McCartin and Smith kept making their case anyway, but on Dec. 30, the termination letter arrived, and the courses passed into full government control. In the letter, which Golf Digest has obtained, Doffermyre claimed the Trust failed to make improvements to the course, that it did not offer a “reasonable and credible” proposal to rectify the timeline issues and—in a shock to NLT leadership—that the Trust owed $8.8 million in unpaid rent.

“It was genuinely one of the most ridiculous and disappointing things I’ve ever read,” Smith says.

What Trump sees from above

It is believed that Trump has never played East Potomac, but he flies over it routinely on Marine One, and those who know him say the views of the Washington Monument and Potomac River lodged somewhere in his imagination. What Golf Digest has learned from multiple sources is that the fixation runs considerably deeper than scenery. East Potomac has become, improbably, the place where several of the longest-running threads of Trump’s life in golf converge at once.

To understand why, you have to understand his relationship with golf’s establishment—a man who has spent decades being tolerated by an institution he has never quite been allowed to join on his own terms.

The validation he has wanted most—hosting a men’s major—has remained just out of reach, the one prize in golf that has not come regardless of how hard he has pushed. The PGA Championship was set for Bedminster in 2022. Then came the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol attack, and the PGA of America pulled the event within days. The R&A has been equally unmoved on Turnberry, making clear the Open Championship will not return to the Scottish course as long as the owner’s profile threatens to overshadow the championship itself. Diplomatic channels have been quietly worked. The door has not moved. That specific immovability has a way of clarifying ambitions.

Which is what makes East Potomac so compelling to him. A course built from the ground up to his specifications, framed by the D.C. landscape, on ground that no organization can revoke. A chance to finally host the tournament that has always eluded him, in the capital that increasingly bears his imprint. Sources say Trump has already told advisors he wants to bring the Ryder Cup there as well.

A shot of the Washington Monument from East Potomac. (National Links Trust)

The name matters as much as anything else. Since retaking the White House, Trump has been engaged in a systematic project of rechristening American institutions in his image: the Kennedy Center, the U.S. Institute of Peace, a fleet of new battleships. He has reportedly offered to unfreeze $16 billion in infrastructure funding if Dulles Airport in Washington and Penn Station in New York take his name. East Potomac’s proposed rebrand to Washington National may be the polite version of what’s coming. Should Trump Golf ultimately assume operational control—a possibility those familiar with the situation consider likely—the precedent across his portfolio is unbroken. Every course his organization has ever acquired carries the Trump name. Washington National would not be an exception. It would be the one that matters most, the course in the shadow of the monument, the one you can see from above.

The ambition extends beyond hosting and naming. Trump has spent years quietly waging war against the USGA and R&A’s proposed golf-ball rollback, convinced that restricting driving distance would damage the game at every level. His administration has worked backchannels throughout the industry to kill the initiative. But his deeper answer to the distance debate was never going to be regulatory; that would mean deferring to the same institutions that have spent years telling him no. His answer is architectural. Multiple sources have told Golf Digest that Trump wants to remake East Potomac into an 8,000-yard proving ground, a living argument that the way to answer distance is to build longer courses rather than neuter the players hitting them. It is, characteristically, the maximalist response—and one that requires no permission from anyone.

All of which makes the public nature of these courses not an incidental detail but the central irony. Trump has never disguised his feelings about public golf. “It shouldn’t be a game for all strata of society,” he told Golf Digest in a 2015 interview. “It should be something that you aspire to. And I think golf got away from that. And by getting away from it, it actually hurt golf.” His properties have spent decades embodying that philosophy in both prestige and pricing. Most are private, and those with public access charge some of the highest rates in the game. Turnberry now costs more than $1,000 per round for anyone not staying at the resort. A source familiar with Trump’s golf operations says D.C. locals would receive a discount at a redeveloped East Potomac. For a man who has spent his career building golf courses as memorials to exclusivity, that would be a first.

Reality, as always, has its own proposal. East Potomac is a man-made island, hemmed in by the Potomac River and the Washington Channel. Modern major championship hosting requires far more than a great golf course—acres of infrastructure, corporate suites, grandstands, concessions, enough open space to absorb 50,000 fans at once. None of that exists here, and there is no obvious way to create it. The adjacent highway interchange, already one of the city’s chronic pressure points, would become impassable. And before any of that is even addressed, the seawall would need to be rebuilt—a muny can absorb the occasional flood, a major championship venue cannot—at an estimated cost of $600 million.

Lawsuits have entered the picture. In late February 2026, the DC Preservation League and two local residents (represented by Democracy Forward Foundation, Lowell & Associates, and Democracy Defenders Fund) filed to block what they describe as the unlawful redevelopment of a historic public space. Yet the Department of the Interior had already moved well beyond the planning stage. Roughly 30,000 cubic yards of dirt, debris and construction waste from White House renovation work had been deposited onto the East Potomac course. According to the plaintiffs, that material was never tested for pollutants or contaminants before it was dumped onto a public park beside a river. The suit argues these actions violate federal environmental review requirements under NEPA and desecrate the park’s founding purpose. Congress designated East Potomac a public space in 1897, declaring it should be “forever held and used as a park for the recreation and pleasure of the people.” As one plaintiff put it, they are fighting to keep East Potomac from becoming “another private playground for the privileged and powerful.”

The National Links Trust has its own legal footing, if it chooses to use it, and the ground is firmer than the government’s termination letter suggests.

The Trust disputes every substantive claim in the notice. The timeline delays, they argue, were a direct consequence of the government’s own permitting requirements, and the assertion that the Trust failed to submit updated proposals after the initial default notice, Smith says flatly, “is probably false.” The $8.8 million rent allegation, which comprises all of the rent accumulated over the course of the lease, is regarded as an attempt to bully and intimidate.

“It doesn’t even come close to passing the sniff test,” Smith says. “It is wild that they would put that $8.8 million number in there. A small discrepancy would be one thing, but $8.8 million? Come on.”

Golf Digest obtained the Trust’s lease and reviewed its financial filings. The 28-page agreement between the Trust and the National Park Service explicitly permits rent to be offset by capital improvement expenditures. The Trust’s 2024 tax forms show more than $6.5 million spent on leasehold improvements alone, and when other costs are factored in (the 2025 form has not been filed yet), the cumulative figure draws almost level with the government’s $8.8 million claim. The lease also mentions that even if rent is owed, it is not a terminable offense. The Department of Interior did not respond to a request for comment.

As for the timeline defaults, the termination letter’s own cited document undermines the charge: Exhibit D states explicitly that “timeframes are general and subject to change due to compliance timeframes or other circumstances.” The Trust has documented every government-imposed delay. They have kept the receipts.

That does little in the present. The Rock Creek renovation has been halted entirely, though East Potomac and Langston remain open. The Trust has agreed to keep the courses operating despite the lease termination, an act of institutional stubbornness that incubates the slightest of hopes. Keeping the lights on, however, is not the same as moving forward. All the volunteer and outreach programs have been paused. Funding has been cut off, meaning the work that defined the Trust’s mission has stopped cold. The most basic maintenance is all that remains. Without a swift resolution, these courses will slide back toward the disrepair the Trust spent years clawing them out of.

The Trust has retained legal counsel. But despite Trump’s public insistence in December that redevelopment is already in motion, the Trust’s leaders say they have no appetite for a prolonged legal war.

“Everyone has been reaching out: ‘We can’t wait for you to take them down,’ ‘We’re behind you in the fight,'” McCartin says. “We appreciate the love, but we don’t want to fight. Fighting doesn’t get us closer to the goal. Fighting will only hurt the people these places are supposed to serve.

“But if we can’t find a way to work together with the administration, we will absolutely not go down without a fight.”

Built on a dump, becoming a home

The Langston clubhouse on a snowy February morning. Locals are hoping they will be able to save the course from retail development.

Steve Boyle

The course is still buried under snow, but the Langston grille is hopping on a February morning, steam rising from the flat-top as it has for decades. City workers filter in between construction breaks—hard hats on the bar stools, muddy boots on the tile—grabbing egg sandwiches and coffee for five bucks or simply taking refuge from their supervisors for a few stolen minutes. The room has the easy, unhurried energy of a place that knows what it is. Ernie Andrews looks around and rubs his shaved head slowly, the way a man does when he is trying to locate something he hasn’t thought about in a while.

“Hard to remember a time when this place wasn’t alive,” he says, turning toward the clubhouse window as if the glass might show him something the years have blurred.

It shows him the 1970s. Andrews was young then, standing among a crowd of men packed around the small clubhouse television, watching Lee Elder go against Jack Nicklaus. Or trying to watch. The broadcast kept cutting away—to Nicklaus, to the other contenders, to anyone who wasn’t Elder. As a kid, Andrews thought maybe Elder had gotten hurt. It was only from the low, furious grumbles of the men around him that he understood the truth: the cameras were simply refusing to show a Black man playing in Augusta. The anger in that room was the specific kind that has no clean outlet—too large for words, too dangerous for action. And then someone spoke.

What Lee is doing right now, Andrews heard, is going to allow a Black golfer so dominant to come along that they won’t be able to take the cameras off him.

Langston was built as a concession—a nine-hole course on top of an abandoned city dump, handed to the Black community of D.C. as a substitute for the courses they were barred from playing. It was, by design, a lesser thing. And yet what grew here confounded every expectation built into its founding. Langston became the American home of Black golf, where men from the United Golfers Association came to play, practice and compete because the PGA of America’s “Caucasian only” clause left them nowhere else to go. Ted Rhodes, Bill Spiller, Pete Brown, Charlie Sifford—the best golfers in the country, playing in near obscurity. Joe Louis held an exhibition here that drew 2,000 fans. And then there was Ethel P. Funches—cafeteria manager in the mornings, the most ferocious amateur woman golfer anyone around here had ever seen in the afternoons, winning 100 local events and seven national titles.

Even after desegregation, the clientele at Langston remained overwhelmingly Black—not out of obligation, but out of something deeper.

“We weren’t welcomed other places,” says Andrews, who has worked at Langston for more than 50 years—caddie, pro, manager, keeper of its living memory. “And that was fine. We had Langston, which is where we had each other.”

That still holds. The clubhouse functions as a community center, gathering place, employer—reflecting back to its neighborhood a version of itself that is capable and dignified and worthy of good ground. The driving range hums on weekends with junior players who may never have touched a club otherwise.

Which is what makes Langston’s potential fate particularly cruel—and, to those who know this history, unmistakable.

East Potomac is the prize. By most accounts, Langston and Rock Creek are afterthoughts in the Trump administration’s imagination, useful primarily as leverage or, more ominously, as land. Ed Russo, a longtime Trump consultant now chairing the White House Environmental Advisory Task Force, told reporters in January that Tiger Woods had been tapped to lead a Langston renovation. That is not accurate, according to Woods’ TGR Design, which says Woods has other projects committed. The denial matters less than what the rumor reveals: that Langston’s future is being discussed in rooms where no one who loves this place has a seat at the table.

What some in Trump’s orbit see, according to sources, when they look at Langston is not a golf course but a footprint. The land sits in the shadow of the future home of the Washington Commanders, a stadium expected to host Super Bowls. To certain eyes, that proximity transforms Langston from a historic public amenity into a commercial opportunity—retail development, stadium infrastructure, a way to build favor simultaneously with the NFL and the corporations eager to plant flags near the new complex. Whether those plans are concrete, the belief among Langston’s community is widespread that if this were not a Black course, built on Black history, serving a predominantly Black community, it would not be this vulnerable.

“It’s pretty cruel, ain’t it?” Andrews says. It is not really a question. “Things get going the right way, and they’re going to take it away from us for reasons that benefit no one but themselves.”

Some workers have already gone, unwilling to wait for an ending they can see coming. Dwayne Robinson is not one of them. When colleagues have come to him looking for guidance, he has told them to do what’s right for their families. He means it, and holds no bitterness toward those who have left. But for him, it has never been only about the paycheck.

Robinson thinks often about the men and women who built this place out of nothing—who took a city dump and made something that lasted, who fought for nine holes when they deserved 18. It would be easy, he says, to look back and lionize that struggle now that its meaning is clear. What gets lost in that kind of reverence is the harder truth: those people had no idea how the story would end. They were not fighting for a monument. They were fighting because it was the only thing left to do, and because surrender was a cost they refused to pay.

“It’s dire right now, no doubt about it,” Robinson says. He looks out at the snow-covered fairways, white and still, and waiting for play to return. “But them boys in that clubhouse back then—they didn’t have it easy either. To give up now is a disservice to what we inherited.”

Outside, the snow holds. The river runs cold and unhurried past the back nine. Inside the grille, the egg sandwiches keep coming, and the room is loud and warm and full of people, alive in a way that only a place with deep roots can be. Alive because some places don’t die just because someone decides they should. Robinson wraps his hands around a fresh cup of coffee and holds it there, feeling the heat push back against the cold.