The Vietnam War veterans suing over President Trump’s proposed triumphal arch are seeking an emergency court order to block the administration from pursuing its imminent plans to break ground in the Washington D.C. area. Veterans Michael Lemmon, Shaun Byrnes, Jon Gundersen — along with architectural historian Calder Loth — filed their…
Page B2From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 5 September 2026
National Park Service approves Trump's 250-foot arch after its own report finds it wrecks D.C. landmark views
As it ran on the front
The chief pulls the case file: Vietnam War veterans Michael Lemmon, Shaun Byrnes, Jon Gundersen, and architectural historian Calder Loth are heading into court asking a judge for an emergency block on President Trump's planned 250-foot arch, filing days before the government's own excavation date. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told reporters Thursday that excavation on the site would begin within two weeks, which leaves the crew little runway before the shovels start.
The planner spreads the paperwork across the table and finds the fix already sitting in a drawer dated August 28. That is when the National Park Service released a report on the very arch the agency is now clearing the way to build, backing the project while also cataloguing its effects on the sightlines of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. The agency wrote down the damage and signed off anyway; the veterans' filing does not need a new argument, it needs a photocopier.…
…(cont) The tinkerer takes that NPS finding and bolts it to an emergency motion: a temporary restraining order, filed this week, asking a judge to freeze the project before excavation turns the paperwork into a hole in the ground. The part was never hidden. It sat on a government website, under a government seal, describing a government project's effect on federally protected monuments, and it took veterans of a war fought half a century ago to pick it up and file it as a legal instrument days before the deadline the government itself announced.
The muscle's job this time is not to knock a wall down — it is to keep one from going up, a 250-foot one, on ground the same agency already flagged as damaged sightline territory before it cleared that ground anyway.
The pilot flies the motion into a federal courtroom on the strength of a record the government compiled about itself, filed against a two-week clock, ahead of the excavation Burgum announced Thursday.
Whether the block holds is the reader's to watch from here. The report exists, dated, filed, backing the arch and documenting its own damage in the same pages, and the crew did not write a single line of it. The National Park Service did.
“They paid for a study that says the arch wrecks the sightline to the Lincoln Memorial, then used that same study to wave the arch through — that's not an oversight, that's a receipt with the crime written on it in the government's own handwriting. Vietnam vets shouldn't have to file an emergency motion days before groundbreaking just to get somebody to read the paperwork they already filed.”
“Look, the National Park Service did exactly what it's supposed to do — it studied the sightlines, wrote up the impacts, and then, using its expert discretion, approved the project anyway, which is what expert discretion is for. Did I just say the agency's own damage report is the reason to build it faster? That's — that's not how I'd put that.”
The receipts
Excavation work for the construction of President Donald Trump's "triumphal arch" will begin over the next two weeks, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced Thursday.
The White House is moving forward with President Trump's plan to build a massive arch in the capital, with excavation work beginning in the next two weeks. CBS News' Aaron Navarro has more.
Construction of President Trump's 250-feet-tall triumphal arch, nicknamed the "Arc de Trump," is set to begin in Washington, D.C. Weijia Jiang has more.
· National Park Service backs Trump's arch, despite its impact on Washington's sightline from the morgue, 28 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.