They are planning to revive this DC museum. President Trump has other plans

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

For the past decade, a group of golfers, doing their own non-profit business as the National Links Trust, have been systematically raising money and pulling through a lot of red tape in the name of rehabilitating these three courses: Rock Creek, Langston and East Potomac. They continued that way as the East Potomac center, declining though it is, is more than broke, the Rock Creek course has been a death watch for years and the Langston course is in the middle. The doctors go to the place where the bleeding is.

It was at that time.

In an interview Monday, the two founders of the National Links Trust said Trump, aided and abetted by Interior Department officials and his golf interests, is planning to move in and out of the NLT group, as first reported The Wall Street Journal late last week. (The sites are, in fact, managed 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, co-founders Will Smith and Mike McCartin said. NLT expected Tom Doak to do the Blue Course overhaul in an easy way, just like Gil Hanse did at Rock Creek and Beau Welling is on board to do it at Langston. Now they expect Tom Fazio, one of Trump’s golf course architects, to get the job.

“We’re fed up, we’re just fed up,” Smith said Monday. “We believe that golf itself is useful to the community, that golf teaches many values ​​in life,” Smith said, and the team took its cues from that sentiment. If you know Trump’s golf values, they are very different, as his courses are spectacular and spectacular, often with long waterfalls, perfect cart paths and hot dogs which, according to Trump, are the best in the world.

Smith and McCartin, in contrast, wanted the Blue Course to be what it has always been, an easy-to-use course with low green fees but, in the future, a new and improved condition, a course with very interesting topography and design features, unobstructed views of the Potomac River and healthy grass throughout. As they understand it, Trump, working with Fazio, will look for a course with lakes and hills suitable for tournament play. It’s an easy prediction to make because that’s a broad description of many of Trump’s subjects. “We had no desire to make it expensive and fancy,” Smith said. In golf, as in other things, expensive and beautiful is Trump’s stock in trade. As Trump said in Journal“I think what we’re looking to do is just build something different, and build ourselves into the government.”

Do you know the breakneck speed with which Trump oversaw the demolition of the East Wing of the White House and approved the first and second set of plans for the construction of grand ballrooms in its place? “I think they want to do the exact same thing” in East Potomac, Smith said, in terms of speed and decision-making, with little, if any, input from the community.

A text message and a phone call to Interior Department official William Doffermyre, who is familiar with Trump’s thinking on the project, were not returned. It wasn’t a message to Tom Fazio or an email interview request from the White House press office. Last week, Fazio told GOLF.com that he had a two-hour lunch with Trump at the White House in November. He was not asked about his possible involvement in working on the Blue Course at the time but noted Trump’s pride in taking dirt from the East Wing project and dumping it behind a chain-link fence at the East Potomac golf course. “He’s a construction man,” Fazio said.

The National Links Trust expects to be fired 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 have not met certain milestones by certain dates. If that’s true, the men say, it’s because they only work, as McCartin said, “by the book,” which includes dozens of public and organizational presentations, obtaining environmental reviews and approvals from the Commission on Fine Arts, the National Planning Commission and the Office of Historic Preservation. Anyone who has watched Trump knows that he is a big-picture man, attracted to big messages and big themes. Golf course work in the corporate world is a painful process, however it can be.

There is no clear template for what the National Links Trust was hoping to do. Many active golfers are aware of the major renovation projects at Harding Park in San Francisco, The Park in West Palm Beach and Cobbs Creek in Philadelphia. Smith and McCartin say those projects are not models for their Blue Course vision. “If you design a course with a green fee of $250 for the guest and $50 for the locals, it still has to meet the expectations of the golfer paying $250,” Smith said. In other words, something spectacular, in terms of design, environment and facilities. McCartin grew up playing the Blue Course. He would like golfers there to experience what he experienced: great, undisputed golf at an affordable price.

“We’ve worked hard to figure out why this project is, equally, good for the community,” Smith said. “We say here is our project, here is the impact it will have on you, what the president is doing is setting himself the goal of bypassing the public consultation process.

“We’re waiting for the termination letter,” Smith said.

The National Links Trust has several powerful and successful lawyers who assist them on a pro bono basis. The Department of the Interior has 200 attorneys in DC alone.

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

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