"The judge on the case is a crazed lunatic whose courthouse tapes will reveal, may be insane? ... The random golfer bringing the ridiculous lawsuit has ZERO STANDING! ... Work is scheduled to begin IMMEDIATELY!"
At roughly 6 a.m. on Monday, October 19, 2026, hours before Interior Department officials were due on the witness stand, the President posted the lines quoted above about U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, about the plaintiffs, who are represented by Democracy Forward, and about the schedule at East Potomac Golf Links, a century-old public course on federal parkland in Washington. The case concerns whether the felling of nearly 430 trees at the course on October 10, over the Columbus Day holiday weekend, was routine maintenance under a tree management plan, as the government maintains, or the first irreversible step toward replacing the public course with a championship venue designed by Tom Fazio. The record the court is working from is the President own. On June 28, 2026, he posted that, having toured the course with "Tom Fazio, the Great Golf Course Architect," the Interior Secretary and others, "it was determined that... we will build one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World," that work "will go quickly" and "will begin on September 1st," and that "it will be built through the Department of the Interior." At a July 2 hearing the government maintained no final agency action had occurred while acknowledging that Interior and the Park Service "are now trying to meet that schedule" — the government lawyer told the court, "From the President mouth to their ears, Your Honor." The court declined to enjoin, saying it wanted to trust that people were acting in good faith "until proven otherwise, and you have not proven otherwise to me in this litigation." After the October 10 cutting the court entered a temporary restraining order, finding plaintiffs likely to succeed on their National Environmental Policy Act claim and writing of the government position that the trees came down weeks after the President asked Interior to cut them down and "not, say, any other time in the last seven years," that this "asks rather a lot of coincidence." At an October 12 emergency hearing the official who submitted the plan and oversees its implementation testified there was no urgency at all to continuing removal, and agreed the trees could come down tomorrow or a month from now with no difference to the government. On Sunday, October 18, the President posted the first Fazio renderings — eighteen holes across the peninsula — and said work would start November 15, when the existing course would close to play. Over that weekend the Justice Department asked Reyes, a Biden nominee, to recuse herself for bias, citing her having yelled at department attorneys; she denied the motion Sunday. At Monday seven-hour hearing, Greg Wischer, an Interior deputy chief of staff and the administration point person for Mall beautification projects, testified for more than two hours before a courtroom of over 100 people including uniformed Park Service employees. The Justice Department told the court the course would not close, despite the President insistence. The acting Park Service director testified she was unaware of the November 15 date. Reyes said she had already found the government acted in bad faith, said of the timing "I mean, there is no universe in which all of this just coincidentally happened at the same time. There just is not," and indicated she would extend the order, which ran through October 26.
Ran the insult. "Crazed lunatic" was the headline in the Washington Post, WUSA9, NBC News and everywhere else, with the death threats as the poignant close. The insult is real and the threats are real, and neither is the structural story. What went uncovered is that the President and his own lawyers made incompatible representations about the same project on the same morning, and only one set was under penalty. In court the Justice Department said the course is not closing and Interior said the redesign is preliminary; on Truth Social the President published renderings, a closure date of November 15, and the word IMMEDIATELY. The acting director of the National Park Service testified she did not know about the date her own agency head had been given a plan to execute. That is not a communications problem. It is a government telling a federal judge one thing while the President tells the public another, in a case where the judge has already made a formal finding of bad faith. Second miss: the standing attack. "ZERO STANDING" was quoted as invective. It is a legal position the government had already lost — the court found the individual plaintiffs regularly golf at the course and that the tree management plan is final agency action — and the President published it at 6 a.m. on the morning his department was due to defend the opposite posture. Third, the recusal motion. A sitting President calling a judge insane and suggesting her courthouse tapes will prove it, forty-eight hours after his Justice Department formally asked that same judge to disqualify herself for bias and was refused, is a sequence. It was reported as two stories.
Entry #61 asked the President directly whether attacking his own justices undermines the independence of the court. Entry #65 recorded two grand juries refusing his Justice Department request to indict. Entry #71 was an order that restored press badges and exempted the President by name, where the scope of the remedy was the thing nobody read. This entry is the three of them in one morning, over 430 trees. The court in this case did something unusual and it is in the opinion: in July it declined to issue an injunction specifically because it did not want to put people through contempt proceedings, and said it would trust the government to act in good faith until proven otherwise. In October the government cut down nearly 430 trees over a holiday weekend, then told the court the cutting had nothing to do with the plan the President had announced from his own account in June, while the official responsible testified under oath that there had been no urgency to cut them at all. The judge who extended that trust is the judge now receiving death threats, and the President is the person who called her insane at six in the morning on the day his own witnesses contradicted him. The press ran the two words. The finding of bad faith, the refusal of the recusal motion, and a Park Service director who learned the closure date from a social media post are all on the docket.