Trump’s Move to Take Over DC Golf Courses Exemplifies How Privatization Hurts Americans Economically and Crushes Democracy, Equality, and Affordability

Five years ago, the non-profit National Links Trust signed a 50-year lease with the National Parks Service to operate three municipal golf courses in Washington D.C.  Last fall, according to reporting in The Hill, the Trump administration, to which the National Parks Service reports through the Department of the Interior, sent a notice of default to National Links Trust, a local public-private non-profit organization whose mission is to maintain affordable and accessible golf courses for the local golfing communities.

The notice has been shrouded in controversy, as the National Links Trust has been given no clear explanation as to how it has defaulted on the lease or what it can do to resolve any issues with the lease or its operating plans. It actually disagrees it is in default.

Because Trump, who has a history of building and running luxury golf courses, has expressed interest in renovating these courses and developing them as facilities capable of hosting professional tours and international competitions, this suspect notice of default, according to reporting in The Hill, is “widely seen as a first step by the president to take over the courses for potential redevelopment and put his mark on the D.C. golf scene permanently — just as he did . . . by renaming the Kennedy Center after himself.”

Trump’s vision for these courses, according to critics, violates the Links Trust’s mission and threatens to “kill off what was supposed to be a nationwide model for affordable public golf in one of the country’s most densely populated metro areas where the cost of living is skyrocketing.”  Private courses, of the type Trump already owns and which he seems to have in mind for the DC courses, feature green fees twice as much as the DC public courses currently charge and tend to serve an exclusive elite.

Once again, Trump has shown himself averse to using government and taxpayer resources to serve all and to representing the interests of all Americans equally. Rather, once again, he has shown himself to be President who caters only and exclusively to the interests of the small slice of the elite and wealthiest of Americans and who cares little about the affordability crisis currently crushing millions of Americans, despite his rhetorical attempts to define himself as a populist.

Basically, Trump wants to privatize these golf courses. And what we should be able to see from Trump’s apparent move to take over these golf courses is that privatization does not serve the interests of the majority but rather only those of the small percentage of the elite and wealthiest, at the expense of the average American.

Americans will find familiar, I’m sure, the typical narrative we are all typically fed that private industry can provide goods and services more efficiently and effectively than the government can. The government is inefficient and wasteful, we are told.

Does that ring a bell?

My own sense of the world is that this narrative has been largely normalized in American politics and society.

I would ask readers, though, to think deeply and intentionally even for just two seconds about whether or not this narrative that private, for-profit interests provide goods and services more effectively than government-run operations really resonates with your experience.

Think back to the spate of ire unleashed against the private health insurance industry after Luigi Mangione’s murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024. The internet was ablaze with resentful posts sharing people’s experiences about being denied reimbursement or coverage for medical care doctors recommended for patients.

At this moment, Americans experienced a moment of shared consciousness that a healthcare industry designed to create profit for shareholders was not one that put their interests first. It should be obvious that the primary interest of these corporations is not the public health, the public good, but creating wealth for private individuals. Serving the health of the public is subsidiary.

In this case, we can see that privatization is at odds with the public good.

And even right-wing think tanks agree that a government-run medicare-for-all healthcare system would save American trillions of dollars over the next decade while making sure EACH AND EVERY AMERICAN HAS ACCESS TO HEALTH CARE!

That’s what an egalitarian society—a government of, by, and for the people—looks like. And if all of us are using this system, including the wealthiest among us—well, you can make sure there will be lots of interests making sure it works well.

A two- or multi-tiered system enables those with the wealth to avail themselves of the best health care available and ignore the rest.

And “privatization” also tends to entail the public giving up ownership of what already belonged to us only so a private interest can sell back to us for a profit what we the people, we the public, possessed.

Trump’s policies have been enabling private corporations to lease public lands for less so they can access coal, energy, gas, and minerals at lower royalty rates. Those resources are really OUR resources. They belong to the American people; they are public property.

And yet private corporations are allowed to extract what already belonged to the American people and sell it back to us for a profit.

The more federal administrations surrender our ownership of the country to private interests, the more un-egalitarian our society becomes and the less control we the people have over resources and hence the more power we give up. We become dependent on, or at the mercy of, private corporations.

Or, in the case the Trump’s proposed golf courses, the less access we have to what is or what was ours. Access becomes unequal, tilted toward the wealthiest in a multi-tiered class-stratified society.

If we want affordability, if we want an economy that works for all, we need public ownership, not privatization.

Some would decry public ownership as socialism. I think it’s simply democracy.