It’s not easy saying no to the president, but Tom Fazio did.

When President Trump asked the acclaimed course designer late last year if he’d be game to renovate East Potomac Golf Links — a nearly century-old D.C. municipal course just south of the National Mall — Fazio didn’t need long to mull the offer.

“A quick ‘no,’” he said the other day, recalling his conversation with the president. “Because I don’t deal with aggravation.”

By aggravation, Fazio, who is 81, meant the extensive permitting, approvals and other red tape that often accompany municipal projects. Trump’s vision also would mean unwinding plans already underway by D.C. nonprofit National Links Trust. In 2020, the Department of the Interior had granted NLT a 50-year lease to manage and restore East Potomac and D.C.’s other two munis, Langston and Rock Creek. For the East Potomac redo, NLT had tapped another marquee designer in Tom Doak. Stepping over that work was certain to draw opposition from the local golf community.

But then, by sheer coincidence, Fazio’s wife Sue intervened. Sue had a D.C. trip scheduled to visit a friend and urged Tom to join her. Tom, who was busy with work, at first resisted but then relented and used the getaway as an opportunity to tour East Potomac, which sits on a manmade peninsula with the Washington Channel to the east, the Potomac River to the west and Washington Monument views to the north.        

“I thought, ‘Holy mackerel, this is awesome,’” Fazio said.

He called the president.

“I told you no,” Fazio told Trump, “but you were right.”

The site was too good to turn down.  

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FAZIO HAS KNOWN TRUMP for decades. He has designed four courses in Trump’s portfolio, including the first course at Trump Bedminster, the president’s New Jersey hangout. (Fazio’s course-designer nephew, Tommy Fazio, and Tommy’s course-designer father, Jim, also have their names on Trump courses.) In November, Fazio visited the White House, where he and the president talked golf. They do that occasionally, but mostly by phone and only on weekends. “He’s got other things to do,” Fazio said with a laugh. “He’s running the world.”

The world, and other things. One of the first signs that East Potomac was on Trump’s radar came in October when dump trucks full of dirt from the president’s East Wing renovation project began showing up at the facility and depositing tons of debris in an area near the 4th and 9th holes on the nine-hole executive course. (The property also has a 18-hole regulation course and nine-hole par-3 course.)

A more obvious indicator of Trump’s interest came at the end of December, when the Interior Department broke the NLT’s lease, alleging the organization had failed to pay rent and was underdelivering on maintaining and improving the courses; NLT roundly disputed the claims.

The Interior Department’s decision left the three munis’ futures in an awkward, unsettling limbo that extended through the first four months of 2026. Then, on May 9, the administration provided some clarity, announcing it had reached a deal with several private and public entities, including Fazio Design, to begin “immediate renovations” of East Potomac, while returning oversight of the Langston and Rock Creek renovations to the NLT.

None of this activity has come without resistance. In February, two D.C.-area golfers, in tandem with the D.C. Preservation League, sued the administration for threatening to undermine East Potomac’s role as a public park. Earlier this month, in response to a different filing, a federal judge ruled the administration could proceed with maintenance work on the course but was prohibited from overhauling it without prior notice and proper approvals. Save East Po, an advocacy group that has been protesting Trump’s plan, describes itself as “people who love East Potomac and want to make sure the character of this special place continues for the next generation of DMV residents.”

Some of the public’s pushback has made its way into Fazio’s inbox. “I’ve gotten some emails and requests from people telling me, ‘Don’t work on that project,’” he said. “Some of them were very insulting; some of them are what I’d call ridiculous. But that’s beside the point. I guess you get used to that when you deal with a lot of different opinions and personalities.”

Whatever criticism Fazio weathers or whatever obstacles he’ll need to overcome to see this rebuild through, he believes the payoff will be worth it. The site, in his mind, is that special.

“It’s Pebble Beach quality land in terms of environment, in terms of setting,” he said. “The president’s idea is to upgrade it to be literally a national monument — and there’s no reason it can’t be a national monument.”

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FAZIO KNOWS AND APPRECIATES what the existing version of East Potomac means to D.C. residents. He has friends in the area whose children grew up playing the course; they have expressed to him their concerns about what might become of their beloved muni, the same concerns you’ll hear from many East Potomac regulars. What will happen to green fees, which now are capped at $48? Will the new design, which can play to nearly 7,700 yards — and which Trump has said he’d like to see host majors and a Ryder Cup — box out beginners and shorter-hitters? Will the facility assume an upscale or exclusive atmosphere that could alienate some golfers? Will it lose its ties to its rich history and to the original reversible Walter Travis design that the heralded Golden Age architect laid down in 1921?

“It’s controversial,” Fazio allows, adding of the president, “Anything he’s involved with becomes controversial.” But, Fazio said, it’s also too early to jump to conclusions. “Facts have been not put out yet,” he said. Indeed, the administration has offered few specifics about its plans for the property. Last week, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum shared Fazio’s preliminary design for the site but accompanied only by a brief message that read in part, “Like iconic public courses of Bethpage Black & Torrey Pines, East Potomac will offer locals — of the National Capital Region — championship-quality golf at affordable, highly discounted rates.”

Fazio has no insight into what those rates might be but suspects that the fees will be subsidized for locals, as they have been at other high-profile muni rebuilds in recent years, including The Park in West Palm Beach, Fla.; Memorial Park in Houston; and The Patch in Augusta, Ga., where Fazio led the re-design along with Beau Welling.    

Fazio has little experience working with municipalities or, as he puts it, “the processes that go along with getting lots of different opinions.” But his job, as he sees it, is to build the best possible golf course and facility he can within the parameters that are provided to him by the Interior Department. Ideally, he said, he’ll work quickly, which aligns with Trump’s wishes. “The president happens to be a guy of action,” Fazio said. “He wants to get this thing done so people can enjoy it play it, and not one of these ‘10 years down the road and drag it out forever’ things. He wants to get it done now.”

That has been Trump’s m.o. with projects all over town, ranging from the White House ballroom addition to his remodeling (and renaming) of the Trump Kennedy Center to his plans for a statue park along the Potomac River. He seems determined to leave his physical legacy on the city.

At East Potomac, though, Fazio can’t just snap his fingers. He needs engineering, environmental and legal clearance before he can break ground. In terms of an estimated start date, he said, “We’ll probably know in a month or so from now based on the steps that have to be taken through the permit approval process and the regulations that have to be done.”

Best case, Fazio said, he’d start construction later this summer, grass the course next summer and have it ready for play in the spring of 2028. “That’s, like, the most optimistic schedule that anybody can have, right?” he said.

Barring a third term, Trump’s last day in office will be Jan. 20, 2029.

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WHEN FAZIO DOES GET MOVING in earnest, one of his top priorities will be improving drainage and building up the property’s low-lying areas so they don’t take on as much water as they do now — not only from rain but also from tidal surges. “I don’t know what we’re going to do yet,” he said. “We’re evaluating what do we do to keep it from flooding? How do we grow grass on the turf? We’re doing all those studies as we speak.”

Fazio said the president already has asked him what the renovation will cost. Fazio doesn’t know. “I don’t have an idea yet until we evaluate all the conditions and deal with the constraints of the site,” he said. “Certainly, we know more rules and more regulations mean more cost. Just simple facts. That’s what we’re looking at now and evaluating how much dirt are we going to move to elevate the areas that flood.” He said he’ll expect to have a better handle on budget in several weeks.

Some savings will come by way of the more than 30,000 cubic yards of dirt from Trump’s White House renovation project, which, according to National Park Service data, contains low levels of lead, chromium and other toxic metals. Some savings, Fazio said, but not much savings. “It’s nothing,” he said of the volume of soil relative to what the whole project will require, adding the president “was shocked when I told him that.” Fazio said he intends to use the debris to build a couple of greens and a couple of bunkers, but “it won’t raise the land and keep it from flooding.”

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The current plan has the opening two holes — parallel par-4s — detached from the rest of the layout in the northwest corner of the property, with a sprawling practice range flanking the 2nd hole and, beyond that, a nine-hole par-3 course. The remaining 16 holes will sit on the footprint of the existing course with about half the holes, Fazio said, occupying the existing corridors.

The current holes all run north and south; Fazio plans to change that. “We like to bend and twist and create some variety in different sun angles and those kinds of things,” he said. Given he has limited land with which to work, he called the design process an exercise in “space allocation.” Fazio added that he would have liked to extend the layout all the way to the end of the peninsula but said “that’s not the criteria that I was given to work with.”

From the back tees, the course will play a beefy 7,660 yards. That figure, paired with the president’s desire for the course to test the world’s best players, has some locals worrying about playability. Fazio is keen to allay those concerns. “I’ve never done a golf course that’s not playable for [a high-handicapper],” he said. “I wouldn’t do it any other way.” The course, he said, will, at a minimum, have two sets of forward tees, two sets of middle tees and two sets of championship tees. “If we only put the third tee from the front,” he said, “guys who are serious players would say, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s a short golf course and I’m not interested in that.’”

But, yes, Fazio is intending for the course, when all stretched out, to challenge elite players. “There’s not one golf course I’ve ever done that [the developer] hasn’t thought that we’d be able to hold a major championship on. We’re going to build the best golf course — the equivalent to the Aronominks and the Quail Hollows and the Shinnecocks. It’s gonna be that quality, whether you have an event or not.”

Trump wants an event, a big one, and Fazio said his planning has accounted for how galleries might flow through the property, and that some of the contouring he’s envisioning could serve as natural vantage points for fans. How tens of thousands of spectators, vendors and tournament support staff might get in and out of the peninsula is another matter, likely one best suited for logistics experts to solve. Still, Fazio said there is a need for more tournament-ready courses in the D.C. area.

“There are many golf courses in the region that can host a PGA-quality event,” Fazio said, noting such sites as Congressional, TPC Avenel and Caves Valley, which is north of Baltimore. “But most of them don’t want to, because that means you have to give up your golf course.”

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PRESERVING OR PAYING HOMAGE to Travis’s original design was not top of mind for Fazio, he said, partly because maps and references from Travis’s work are scant but more so because the existing design isn’t suited for the modern game. “There won’t be any holes that are exactly the way they are now because they’re not acceptable in today’s golf standards,” he said. “People talk about designing or preserving the old golf courses. If Donald Ross or [A.W.] Tillinghast, the famous great old designers, if they would have had the budgets and equipment we had today, they would’ve done a whole lot of things differently than they did.”

The current clubhouse, with pillars that resemble a D.C. monument, will stay and be refurbished, Fazio said. The addition of a second clubhouse down the line is also a possibility. “Our job and my job always is to look at options and possibilities and what can be done over time,” Fazio said.

The new range, which will replace the dilapidated double-decker range that now sits on the northwest corner of the facility, will run south to north. That is intentional so late in the day golfers won’t be hitting into the setting sun, as they do now. “When you hit a golf ball, especially on a practice tee,” Fazio said, “you kind of like to see it land.” Fazio said the range will extend to 400 yards from the back tee with players hitting balls toward the Washington Monument. “The president loves practice ranges,” Fazio said, so Fazio and his team are aiming to take full advantage of East Potomac’s dramatic setting.

“Where’s the greatest practice range you’ve ever seen?” he continued. “Well, if you stood on the practice tee at the East Potomac and hit balls, that could be as good as any place in the world. Of course, as an American, I’d say that, because I’m looking at the Washington Monument. But it’s a big deal.”  

The par-3 course, which flanks the east side of the property, next to the Blue course, will be nixed and replaced by another nine-hole short course on the northeast corner of the parcel. Fazio said he expects the hole yardages to be line in with the current course, where the shortest hole from the back tees is 64 yards and the longest is 208 yards. East Potomac’s recently restored miniature golf course, which is the country’s oldest continuously operating miniature golf course and listed in the National Register of Historic Places, will remain, Fazio said.

Changes are afoot, and local golfers can expect them to come sooner than later, with a seal of approval from the highest office in the land.

“As the president says, as a guy who’s a golfer, he’s just not happy with a golf course with very little grass on it, with bad drainage, with bad putting surfaces, with not quality experiences,” Fazio said. “He’s going to fix it.”