The Atlantic Gift Article: “Chain-link fences, construction cranes, armed guards, and portable toilets everywhere…In Washington, Trump’s dreams have been slowed by lawsuits. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Birnbaum’s Washington-based nonprofit, has filed a challenge to Trump’s renovations to the Reflecting Pool and joined as a co-plaintiff on suits related to the president’s plans for the Kennedy Center and a “National Garden of American Heroes” in West Potomac Park. Trump’s proposals for a ballroom and an arch also face legal challenges. Some of the suits are aimed at proving that the Trump administration is avoiding the normal review process for federal projects that would reshape the capital landscape in ways that it hasn’t been in decades. Birnbaum said that he has been “gobsmacked” that the careful layout of the city and the legal protections that have been in place for more than a century are being upended…Trump has argued that his projects are an emergency and thus need to bypass certain rules that would typically apply. (“We knew the 250th was coming,” Birnbaum countered dryly. “It didn’t sneak up on us.”) This is how the administration gave no-bid contracts for work on the Reflecting Pool, providing $14.7 million to the contractors that installed sealant that has been peeling away, and another $1.7 million for a “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” that is supposed to combat the algae that grew so rapidly in recent weeks…He paved over the Rose Garden’s central lawn and added patio furniture, installed two 100-foot-tall flagpoles on the North and South Lawns, and repaved the colonnade with black granite (Trump said that he would pay for the repaving himself but has instead billed it to taxpayers, as my colleague Michael Scherer discovered). White House officials told me that the more ambitious projects—the ballroom and the arch—will take longer because of federal reviews and the amount of construction required…” [A combination of deeply sad and infuriating…DC will never be our historic capital again. The extent of the damage to buildings, monuments, landscapes, memorials, open spaces, the environment and the ecology, will likely be permanent.]