On Sunday the President Told Israel Whom to Elect, Told Ukraine Its Oceans Are Gone, and Closed a Golf Course a Federal Judge Is Still Hearing Arguments About

Three posts, each signed with his title, each closing "Thank you for your attention to this matter." Each has an error a staff would have caught, and a sentence no president has written before.

The first went up at 7:45 on Sunday morning, the second at 1:36 in the afternoon, the third the same day. All three are written as letters. All three are signed with the office. Taken together they’re a record of how the presidency is being conducted this month: toward an allied electorate, toward a war he’s chosen a side in, and toward a federal court with a hearing scheduled for Monday morning. Each letter contains at least one error of fact. The errors matter less than the sentences built on top of them, and those sentences deserve to be read exactly as written.

7:45 a.m. To the Great People of Israel

Israel votes on October 27, nine days from the post. It’s the first national election since the attack of October 2023, and the polls going in had Gadi Eisenkot’s new party ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud in four consecutive surveys, with neither bloc at a majority. Into that race, the president of the United States wrote a letter of “Complete and Total Endorsement” and addressed it to the voters of another country.

American presidents have favored candidates in Israeli elections before. Bill Clinton openly preferred Shimon Peres in 1996 and said so afterward. Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights two weeks before the April 2019 vote, with Netanyahu beside him at the White House. What the record doesn’t contain is a president stating in writing that American military action depends on which candidate a foreign democracy chooses. That sentence sits in the middle of Sunday’s letter. “If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi,” he wrote, “America will have to do this work ourselves,” and he is “not inclined to do so.”

“This work” is the war with Iran, which the United States and Israel began together in February. Two lines earlier the letter describes that war as nearly won: Iran “systematically destroyed, both Militarily and Financially,” with the United States ready to “finish the job.” The defense secretary has announced Iran’s destruction on four separate dates since March. Bloomberg reported this month that Iran’s missile factories are intact and that Russia is helping to restock them. Two-thirds of American voters disapprove of the president’s handling of the war, according to Pew. The letter’s threat, read plainly, is that if Israelis elect someone other than Netanyahu, the United States will have to complete a war it claims to have already won, and the president may decline.

The letter also misstates the history it invokes. It refers to Iran’s “51 year old chant” of “Death to Israel, Death to America.” The Islamic Republic dates to 1979, forty-seven years ago. A fifty-one-year-old chant would have originated in 1975, under the Shah, when Iran was an American ally and client.

Netanyahu responded by video within hours, calling Trump the greatest friend Israel has had in the White House. He did not address the condition attached to the endorsement. His corruption trial is ongoing. He asked President Herzog for a pardon last November, weeks after Trump wrote to Herzog requesting one on his behalf. The letter mentions none of this.

1:36 p.m. My decision on Russia

The second letter is the president’s explanation of Friday night, when he signed an executive order waiving nearly every provision of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, two days before its sanctions were due to take effect. The Act permits a waiver if the president certifies to Congress that it serves the national interest and submits a report explaining the basis. The certification was sent. No report has been made public. Sunday’s post is the nearest thing to one, and it should be read as such.

It begins by describing the law as a document he has not signed. “Signing that document at this time will do that,” he writes, meaning drive Russia from negotiations, “and I can sign it later, or any time that I want!” He signed the Act on September 18. What he did on Friday was suspend its operation. The letter recasts the waiver of a statute as a decision he’s holding in reserve, to be exercised on his own schedule. That is a different arrangement from the one Congress wrote, and a more accurate description of the one now in effect.

The reasons follow in sequence. “Great progress is being made, and that includes current hostage negotiations!” Neither the White House nor the State Department has identified which hostages. “Russia is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran,” which is contradicted by the Bloomberg reporting on the missile factories. Zelensky “is using Diesel Refineries in Russia as a target,” the letter says, and the strikes are “seriously hurting the world diesel markets, including those in the United States.” Analysts of those markets attribute the pressure principally to the Iran war and Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz in response to it. The letter then notes that Russia “is, nevertheless, sending, at a low price, millions of barrels of diesel to the World.” The president suspended American sanctions on that diesel earlier this month. The sentence is a commendation of the product.

The final third of the letter concerns Zelensky, and it’s where the document moves from inaccuracy to something graver. “His country is in shambles, a large portion of his land is lost,” it says, and then: “his oceans and seas are gone, and his male population is low, wounded, and/or dead.”

Ukraine has no ocean and never has. It has a Black Sea coast that it continues to hold from Odesa westward, from which it has driven the Russian fleet out of the western Black Sea and restored its grain exports by sea. It lost its coast on the Sea of Azov in 2022. Both nouns in “oceans and seas are gone” are wrong. The clause that follows is a sitting president citing an ally’s dead and wounded as evidence the ally should have surrendered sooner, in a letter arguing that the country responsible for those casualties should be spared sanctions so it won’t be “foolishly” driven from the table. “He could have made a better deal two years ago” places that deal in October 2024, when no proposal was before either side. The last negotiations that produced a draft text were in Istanbul in the spring of 2022.

On the day the letter was posted, Ukraine launched more than a thousand drones into Russia and set fire to two oil facilities in St. Petersburg. Russia struck energy infrastructure in four Ukrainian regions overnight. Zelensky said Russia had now violated the “energy ceasefire” the president announced a week earlier seventy-six times. “I WANT THIS WAR END!” the letter concludes. The terms on which it wants the war to end are the subject of the letter, and they’re Russia’s.

The same day. The golf course

The third letter announces that the Department of the Interior, “under the auspices of Secretary Doug Burgum,” together with the golf course architect Tom Fazio, has a plan to replace East Potomac Golf Links in Washington with a championship course capable of hosting the U.S. Open and the Ryder Cup. It describes the existing course as “old, broken, dilapidated, and of no further use or effect.” It sets a closing date of November 15 and a reopening in approximately fifteen months.

The course sits on Hains Point, inside a national park. Golf has been played there since 1921; the eighteen-hole course was laid out by Walter Travis. In 2025 it recorded 124,500 rounds, more than any course in the Washington region. In July 1941, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes sent three Black golfers onto it under the protection of six U.S. Marshals, because the capital’s courses would not otherwise admit them; they played eighteen holes through jeers and threats. In 2020 the National Park Service signed a fifty-year agreement with a nonprofit, National Links Trust, to operate it and two other public courses in the District. The administration terminated that agreement at the end of last year and has since allowed the trust to run the course on an interim basis.

The termination produced a lawsuit, and the lawsuit is why the timing of Sunday’s letter matters. The case is DC Preservation League v. Department of the Interior, before Judge Ana Reyes. In July she ordered the government to disclose any long-term plans for the course and to refrain from unannounced changes to it. The government’s position before the court has been that no final decision about the course has been made. Earlier this month the Park Service removed roughly 430 trees over a single weekend. Reyes’s opinion of October 13 found that Interior officials had ordered, reviewed and approved that work over five days before the equipment arrived, and she entered a restraining order barring further cutting through October 26. The Justice Department has since moved to have her removed from the case for bias.

The next hearing is Monday morning. An Interior Department official and the acting director of the National Park Service are scheduled to testify. The question before the court is whether the government still maintains that no final decision exists. On Sunday the president published one, with a date, an architect, and a closure notice, in a letter signed with his office. The government’s attorneys will be asked on Monday to reconcile their representations to the court with their client’s public statement of the day before. A previous start date, September 1, passed without work beginning.

Tom Fazio designed the Old Course at Trump National Bedminster, Trump National Philadelphia at Pine Hill, and the two courses at Lowes Island that became Trump National Washington after Trump purchased the club. He is the president’s architect, engaged by the president’s Interior Department to rebuild a public course in a national park. The letter does not say who will pay for the work. Neither do the court filings.

Any time that I want

The three letters share a signature and a closing line. They also share a premise, stated outright in the Russia letter: “any time that I want.” The sanctions take effect when the president decides. Israel’s election produces the correct result, or the United States withdraws from a war it began. The golf course closes on November 15 regardless of what a federal judge hears on Monday. A statute passed 86 to 11, an allied electorate, and a court with a case pending are each addressed in the same register, as parties to be informed of a decision already made.

The factual errors are what make the letters legible as a set. A chant dated four years before the revolution that produced it. An ocean attributed to a country that has none. A law described as unsigned by the man who signed it. A course of “no further use” that hosted more rounds than any in the region. These are the errors of a president writing without anyone in a position to correct him, and the sentences surrounding them, the condition placed on Israel, the accounting of Ukraine’s dead, the date set over the head of a judge, are the consequence of the same absence.

Judge Reyes convenes on Monday morning. She will be the first official in a position to ask the government to explain the difference between what its lawyers have told her and what the president has told everyone else.