Trump's 250-foot arch for snipers and drones, built for America's 250th anniversary, draws second lawsuit this month

…(cont) That's the list. I didn't add anything to it. That's just the order it came in.

Now, the twenty-eighth. I want to go back to the twenty-eighth, and I'm sorry, because I assumed the first time that I'd copied it down backwards. The council's vice chairman, Travis Voyles, sent a letter saying the consultation was closing, and here's the reason given: addressing the experts' concerns and the general public's would require them to deviate from the president's vision for the project. A preservation group said it was gobsmacked. That's their word, not mine.

I keep coming back to it — sorry — because of the eight days. On the twentieth, the military asked for a change, and the President wrote that he had agreed to convert the arch. Eight days later the letter goes out explaining that changes can't be addressed.

And before either of those, on the fourth of September, an attorney named Nicolas Sansone said the administration had no legal authority to begin work on its monumental arch. The excavation announcement came that same Thursday anyway.

Here's what I can't get past, and it's small. My car's been going to the same garage for eleven years, fan belt, always the fan belt. Last time the kid hands me a clipboard at the counter, and the clipboard says, tell us anything else you've noticed. So I notice. I write down the shimmy at forty, I write down the wiper. He reads it, he hands the clipboard back to me, and he says he can't put those on the ticket, because the ticket's already approved and anything I noticed would change the ticket. Then he asks me to initial the bottom. I'm still paying for the clipboard, is my point. I paid a man to ask me.

I apologize, I'm on the twenty-eighth again. Somebody typed that letter. Somebody printed it, somebody signed it, somebody carried it down a hallway to go out. That's a person walking a piece of paper across a room to tell the experts that the review they were in the middle of had reached the one answer it wasn't allowed to reach.

Then October 9. Arlington County sues over a 250-foot arch, citing tourism and the safety of local residents. Two hundred fifty feet, for the 250th anniversary of the country, planted between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The people buried there don't get a comment period either, but nobody closed theirs on a Monday.

Which brings us to yesterday. D.C. and Virginia, in federal court, against the Park Service and Interior, arguing the thing should have required congressional approval and that its height is a problem. That's the second suit this month. The consultation cost somebody nothing to shut. The lawsuits cost two states and a county their lawyers.

Excuse me — before you go, you've got your hand on the door. Just one thing. Two requests landed in September. The military's, on the twentieth, which got the arch changed. The public's, which was still open on the twenty-eighth. So which of those two turned out to be the deviation from the president's vision?