President Donald Trump was just humiliated in court – by a judge who invoked Dr. Seuss in order to do it.
“Rarely, if ever, has the United States Department of Justice urged a federal court not to believe the sitting President,” Judge Ana C. Reyes said in her ruling on Monday. She referred to how Trump’s Department of Justice is urging her to not interpret the president’s own statements about destroying historic cherry trees to renovate the East Potomac Golf Links as literal truth.
“Not to believe him that a cabinet secretary has ‘developed’ a federal land project,” Reyes continued. “Not to believe him that the secretary’s agency will destroy a historic golf course already on the land. Not to believe him that ‘Restoration work’ will begin ‘IMMEDIATELY!’ Not to believe him that the course ‘will be closed’ for over a year. Not to believe what the President has repeatedly told the American public. And yet, here we are.”
She concluded, “The Court earlier stated, ‘I am not the Lorax. I do not speak for the trees.’ The Court still does not speak for the trees. It speaks only for the rule of law.”
This is not the first time Reyes has cited “The Lorax” in the East Potomac Golf Links case, with Politico’s Kyle Cheney reporting on X in September that on another occasion during the case Reyes “referenced “Alanis Morissette; A random caller demanding her removal from the bench; The Lorax; and George Washington chopping down a cherry tree.”
The Trump administration has not done much to deny that it is ignoring the rule of low. Earlier in October one of Trump’s closest aides, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, posted on X that “I missed the part of the Constitutional Convention that put federal judges in charge of golf course maintenance. The Left is endlessly enraged that, after allowing DC to decay for decades, the Trump Administration is making it safe, clean and beautiful.”
Critics accuse Trump of trying to remake the area according to his vision without the consent of the public which has to use it. The Washington Post’s sports writer Rick Maese wrote on X in September, “Trump’s plan shrinks the course from 36 holes to 18 but impacts more than golfers. It eliminates Ohio Drive, historic mini golf and a grove of Japanese cherry trees — reshaping space used by thousands of cyclists, runners, anglers, bird-watchers and picnickers.”