The 7,600-Yard Question: Who Is Trump's East Potomac Plan Actually Built For?

A 79-year-old man was walking the course carrying his own bag. John Garrity, East Potomac Golf Links, the public course in Washington, D.C. A few holes in, the chest pain started. A heart attack. Nobody on the property that day needed to be told where help would come from — a man came out of the pro shop, picked him up, got him to a hospital. Surgery followed. The report was good.

I raise that episode because it is the hardest data point in the argument that broke out last week, and it has no column in any architectural rendering. A proposal has surfaced to redesign East Potomac: in place of 36 holes, a mini-golf course and a driving range, a single 18-hole championship course stretched past 7,600 yards.

Seven thousand six hundred yards. In my notebook that number sits alone right now, because the things that give it meaning are nowhere in the proposal — how many tee times survive, what the green fee becomes, and whose pocket the 7 a.m. slot comes out of.

I went in to watch a game and came out with a ledger. That is the habit, and it is the one doing the work here.

Context: whose land, whose course

East Potomac is not an ordinary municipal course. It sits on Hains Point, a manmade peninsula of fill in the Potomac River, managed by the National Park Service. That makes it federal land, and the essential character of the facility on it was caught by the columnist in a single sentence: public in every sense.

That sentence is familiar to me. In March 2026 I was sixteen and got into the Royal Calcutta Golf Club media tent with a letter on a school magazine's letterhead, a number and some nerve. I talked my way past the gate with a letter, a number, and a nerve. What I found inside was not glory copy: total purse INR 40 lakh, winner's cheque INR 6 lakh, a caddie's loop at INR 800 a round, and roughly 200 club members in a city of 15 million. I stopped writing glory that week and started writing ledgers.

So when the East Potomac proposal landed, my first question was not aesthetic. It was capacity. Going from 36 holes to 18 reads like a design decision on paper. In practice it is a decision to roughly halve the supply of tee times. And of the three things the facility had — 36 holes, mini-golf, a range — the fate of the mini-golf course and the range is not settled anywhere in the proposal. Juniors, beginners, seniors and the time-poor reach the game through exactly those two assets.

The most reliable comparison is Bethpage State Park, which holds five courses: one championship anchor in Bethpage Black, plus four courses any ordinary golfer can walk onto on a Sunday morning. Bethpage's real asset is not Black. It is the spread of five. East Potomac today has no anchor, and the proposal says: bring the anchor, remove the rest. That is not the Bethpage model. It is Bethpage minus the accessibility layer.

Core: length is the least inclusive design variable available

The proposal's core technical characteristic has one name: up-tiering. Lifting a facility out of the volume-and-access tier into the prestige-and-premium tier. And the instrument chosen for that lift is length.

Of all the design variables available, length is the least inclusive. It raises the barrier to entry for beginners, juniors, seniors and the time-constrained — precisely the cohorts a muni on federal land exists to serve. 7,600 yards means long par-5s, long par-4s, and a second shot on every hole that the average player does not have the speed to produce.

One figure is worth putting on the table, usually cited rather than verified: the median recreational male golfer's driving distance is commonly given as 215 to 225 yards. I hold it as context, not as a certified number — but the implication is plain. The distance a 7,600-yard course demands from the back tees is not in the median public golfer's bag. That does not mean such a course should not exist. It means such a course is public in practice only if the forward tees are generously built.

And that is the proposal's largest absence. Tee-box spread — how many sets, at what yardages, at what rating and slope — is the most decisive part of any public-course design. The available material does not state it. A 7,600-yard course with six tee sets is a different product from one with two. Same name, two different worlds.

Then comes the chain I look for in every public-facility proposal and which nobody in this debate has opened. A longer course takes longer to play. Longer play means fewer tee times per day. Fewer tee times means the same maintenance budget has to be funded by a higher green fee per round. The chain starts at length and ends at price — and price is the exact place where a public course either stays public or stops being public.

The available material contains no green-fee data, no rounds played, no revenue, no capital cost, no maintenance budget. The direct consequence is that the financial case cannot be assessed at all. What can be assessed is capacity, and capacity clearly falls.

Core: the plan is not irrational, it is optimised for a different customer

The weakest position in this argument is to assume the proposal has been misread. It has not been misread. It is coherent. It is simply designed for a golfer who is not East Potomac's current customer.

The economics of aspirational golf genuinely work. TPC Sawgrass, Pebble Beach, Pinehurst No. 2 — people pay premium fees at these places because playing them is itself a status, whether or not the score ever drops below 100. The market is for the experience, not the number. And the operator behind this proposal understands that logic. The plan is not irrational; it is optimised for a different customer.

The problem is that this customer is not the mandate of a muni on federal land. And here the debate should have moved from aesthetics into governance procedure, which it did not.

The strongest sentence in the available analysis is also the shortest: East Potomac is not Trump's. That sentence is not sentimental, it is jurisdictional. The land is National Park Service land. Any change is therefore a reallocation of a public asset with a formal process attached — solicitation, public comment, environmental review, and on a manmade peninsula like Hains Point, questions about flood risk and fill stability.

That is the point the columnist asserted and never examined. The single most decisive unstated fact in this story is the transaction structure — lease, concession contract, donation, or design influence only. Public access, pricing and permanence all flow from that term sheet. The available material does not contain it. Whatever is decided will therefore be decided on partial information.

One more question nobody is asking: what is the maintenance backlog? A public facility starved of capital is politically far easier to redesign than a healthy one. Deferred maintenance is the proposal's implicit leverage, and nobody has requested the number.

Core: the pro shop is a service asset, not a championship anchor

Back to Garrity. That episode is not incidental colour. A public course's pro shop is the layer of human infrastructure that a private-club member takes for granted — someone who will come and get you. It is a service asset. A 7,600-yard championship test offers no obvious guarantee that this service asset survives, because the business logic of a championship anchor rests on something else entirely.

A harder question follows, and the columnist did not raise it: emergency preparedness. Going from 36 holes to 18 changes marshalling density. Fewer marshals, less supervision, longer rounds, more heat exposure. Where the AEDs sit, what the check-in protocol is, how many staff are on the ground — this is public safety, not design taste. The material does not cover it, so I hold it as a probable risk rather than a finding.

Now the figure most quoted and least reliable in this entire argument. In 2026 a senator reported that he had shot 73 at Trump National Washington — or possibly 74. The reporter recorded his own hesitation between the two numbers. There is no attested card, no course rating or slope, no tee information, no direct witness. The sample is one.

In my own reporting I have never treated claims of this kind as a performance record. A celebrity score relayed secondhand, with the reporter himself hedging, is colour, not evidence. It can stay in the story. It cannot stay in the argument.

Contrarian: write the strongest conventional case first, then the fact that breaks it

The most honest case for the proposal runs like this. Public golf has no capital. Capital needs prestige. Prestige needs a championship anchor. Bethpage proved it: a public course can host major championships and a Ryder Cup, and that can become its economic lifeline. Give East Potomac that tier and you get tournament hosting, golf tourism, junior-programme prestige and a far stronger case for capital investment. The model is not hypothetical. It has worked.

The available analysis ignores this case entirely. That is its clearest analytical gap. The ledger is one-sided: capacity loss is counted, prestige gain is not.

Now the specific fact that breaks the case. The Bethpage model runs on cross-subsidy, and that cross-subsidy happens inside one system — five courses, one state-park operation, one management structure. Black's premium demand helps carry the accessible courses because both sit under the same roof.

The proposal contains no line saying that any share of a premium green fee funds a junior tee time or a lower-income golfer's round. A single championship course holds no internal transfer. Remove one tier from a facility that had two, and the vehicle for cross-subsidy disappears with it. The lesson of Bethpage is not build an anchor. It is build an anchor and protect the layer beneath it.

A second unstated effect: a championship anchor creates a new stakeholder class — event organisers, tourism boards, equipment and sponsor activation. Whether their interest aligns with the public golfer's is not self-evident. The columnist advocating for the public golfer never mentions this class at all.

Third, and least comfortable. The piece presents itself as constituency services — a public service announcement in the name of the constituency. It says: ask the golfing public what it wants instead of telling golfers what they will get. That is a democratic sentence, not a data sentence. Arguing from representation is coherent for a columnist and leaves the governance analysis incomplete.

The questions that genuinely could be tested, and were not: will there be a competitive process, or will design authority be handed to one party? Could the proponent also become the operator? Did the public receive a genuine needs assessment, or will comment be advisory only? These are procedural questions, not partisan ones, and they are assessable without politics.

In India I have watched the same frame repeatedly. The DLF versus Delhi Golf Club fight never looked like a venue rivalry to me. It was two business models in opposition — heritage, membership and restricted entry on one side; corporate capital, tournament product and a new spectator economy on the other. East Potomac stages the same contest, except heritage is replaced by a federal-land recreation mandate.

Takeaway: watch the term sheet, not the renderings

Many renderings are coming. Each will have morning light, water glinting, and a par-3 fit for a calendar. None of them settles anything.

What settles it is the term sheet — lease length, process, the scope of public comment, and whether it states that the short course, the range and junior tee times survive.

My test is simple and I apply it to every public facility: a Tuesday morning in July, 7 a.m. How many tee times exist, at what price, and how many of them reach the man who is 79 and carries his own bag. If the answer is fewer tee times, a higher price, and that man outside the gate — the course will keep the word public and lose the function.

That is the only number in this whole argument that will never appear in a press release.