The Trees Trump Didn't Cut Down

A summer of cut stumps

Washington in late August felt like a city waiting for a renovation. Plans were circulating for East Potomac Golf Links, a public course inside East Potomac Park, and the president had announced on Truth Social that work would begin September 1 to build what he called one of the greatest golf courses anywhere in the world. Tee times were still available that week for the 18-hole course, the nine-hole courses and the driving range.

At the same time, a different set of trees was already the subject of whispers. Outside the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, a row of weeping willows that had stood for years was gone. The neighborhood blog PoPville noted the removal on October 14, 2025, and by September 2025 images showed the trees still standing. By the time the debate reached its peak, the willows had been gone for months.

The summer became a season for tree stories. Readers emailed questions, social media posts multiplied, and two separate maintenance projects were folded into a single narrative about a president who allegedly ordered historic trees felled for his own projects. The claims moved fast, and the facts moved slower.

The willows outside the Kennedy Center

The willows had become a quiet fixture on the Kennedy Center grounds. A lawyer involved in litigation over planned renovations described them as meant to represent the grief of the nation for the death of former President John F. Kennedy. For many visitors they were simply part of the place, a drooping green fringe against the concrete.

In April 2026, Matthew Floca, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of facilities, testified under oath in a lawsuit seeking to block renovations. He said the center felled its weeping willows because they were falling down. Ninety percent of the trees were decaying and every time there was a heavy wind or rain a tree would fall down. If you walk around the center at that time, you would see limbs falling and trees falling down.

Floca said the removal was a maintenance need. The center was contemplating replacements and had not spoken to the Kennedy Center chairman about the willows or what should replace them. He added that a weeping cherry tree would be perfect, and that the center would develop a comprehensive landscape plan that would include the planters and the willow trees.

The testimony came in a case brought by conservation groups that wanted third-party review before renovations proceeded. A federal judge denied a request for a preliminary injunction on May 29, and the center remained open despite earlier statements that it would close July 4 for renovations.

The claim that President Donald Trump ordered the willows cut down began circulating online in late August and early September 2026. A former adviser wrote on X on September 1 that the iconic weeping willow trees outside the Kennedy Center have been cut down by Trump. Similar posts appeared on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky and Reddit. The center’s management said it felled the trees because of a maintenance need and confirmed Trump was not involved in the decision.

In March 2026 Trump posted digital renderings of his suggested new, highly improved Kennedy Center. The renderings replaced the weeping willows with pink or orange-leafed trees. Weeping willows change color in the fall to yellow or gold, not orange, red or pink. The images suggested a different kind of tree, but they were not a record of what had already been done.

The East Potomac rumor

The other tree story centered on East Potomac Park. The park holds the site of the nation’s first cherry blossom planting, and it contains the public golf courses that were the subject of renovation plans. Readers asked whether the administration had illegally removed dozens of cherry trees, whether it violated a court order, and whether the removals impacted the cherry tree collections gifted to the United States by Japan in 1910 and 1912.

An Aug. 28 Washington Post report became the source of the confusion. The story, headlined about trees coming down by the dozen as Trump’s D.C. golf makeover nears, described newly cut stumps and bare patches of dirt marking places where dozens of trees recently stood. An informal count found that 60 trees appeared to have been removed in recent weeks. The Post mentioned noticing at least one removed cherry tree near the 14th green of the blue course, as well as two large sycamores removed around another area. Out of those 60, only one was a cherry tree.

Social media posts distorted that reporting. One post claimed Trump had illegally chopped down sixty historic cherry trees without court approval so he could renovate a golf course, and cited the Washington Post as saying Trump had chopped down dozens and dozens of beloved cherry and sycamore trees. The article did not say that.

An Interior Department spokesperson said arborists are doing routine maintenance at East Potomac Park with selective removal of hazard trees, non-native invasive trees and declining and dying trees that cannot be brought back to good health through any degree of intervention. Trees throughout the park are regularly monitored for potential safety impacts to visitors, and when a tree is determined to be dying, declining or hazardous our arborists may make the decision to remove it.

The department noted that during the Biden administration the National Park Service removed 300 trees, including 140 cherry trees, from the Tidal Basin area north of East Potomac Park as part of a three-year project that ended with the replanting of 277 cherry trees. Fewer than 100 of the cherry trees Japan gave the United States in the early 1900s remain to this day and are planted along the Tidal Basin.

On May 4 a U.S. district judge said the court must be told if the renovation plans called for the removal of more than 10 trees. Readers worried that the administration was moving ahead despite that order.

What the crews were actually doing

In late August workers with RTEC Treecare were cutting down trees at the park. The company told the Post it had not removed any cherry trees. Its website later carried a pop-up message saying it had not removed any cherry trees at East Potomac Park Golf Course and that its work had been limited to trees identified by the National Park Service as hazardous, non-native, or invasive.

An advocacy group, Save East Po, which describes itself as an independent grassroots coalition of neighbors, runners, cyclists, picnickers, fishers, families and golfers who want East Potomac Park public, accessible and affordable, said it knew for certain that one cherry tree was cut down. A spokesman said he had noticed people online saying sixty cherry trees. That is totally untrue. We know for certain that one cherry tree was cut down. He added there might have been one other, but he was not certain. The group is concerned that more will come down as the administration continues to operate in closed-door ways.

Tee times remained bookable on the East Potomac Golf Links website through the first week of September. The renovation plans remained unclear, and the project was subject to a lawsuit filed by a preservation group and two D.C.-area golfers, including citing crews dumping White House East Wing debris at the site. No major renovations had begun yet as of early September.

How a maintenance job becomes a story

The two tree episodes shared a pattern. A routine decision about aging or hazardous trees became a story about political motive. The Kennedy Center willows were removed in October 2025 because they were falling down. The testimony about decaying trunks and falling limbs was given in court, not in a press release. The East Potomac removals were described by the department as selective removal of hazard trees, non-native invasive trees and declining and dying trees.

The claims that traveled farthest were the most dramatic: that Trump ordered the willows cut down, that sixty cherry trees were felled for a golf course. The numbers were borrowed from the Washington Post’s informal count of 60 trees removed, a figure that included sycamores, invasive species and hazardous specimens, with only one cherry tree mentioned.

The renderings Trump posted in March, showing pink or orange-leafed trees where willows had stood, added a visual cue that felt like confirmation to readers already primed to see a pattern. The willows’ association with grief made them symbolic, and symbols are easier to weaponize than maintenance logs.

The ending that didn’t arrive

By early September the rumors had been circulating for weeks, but the work had not begun. The golf course renovation that was supposed to start September 1 had not started. The Kennedy Center remained open. The willows were gone, but the decision to remove them was described in sworn testimony as a response to trees that were decaying and falling.

The stories about trees persisted because they offered a simple moral: historic beauty destroyed for personal ambition. The record that was available was less dramatic and more ordinary: arborists removing hazardous trees, a facilities manager explaining decay, a court case about renovations, and a public park where tee times were still being sold.

That ordinariness is harder to share than a villainous headline, but it is what the evidence supports. The trees that were cut were cut for maintenance, not for a proclamation. The claims that they were ordered by a president were false, and the numbers that went viral were not the numbers that were removed.