To the editor:

I recently read the article “Trump says Washington has waited 200 years for the arch he wants to build,” in the Feb. 5 edition of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.

Mr. Trump’s claim that, “For 200 years they’ve wanted to build an arc [sic],” unsupported by history but quickly echoed by a White House spokesperson, calls to mind a line from Douglas Adams’s radio program, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Adams’s narrator explains that the Guide may be imperfect but it makes “the reassuring claim that where it is inaccurate it is at least definitively inaccurate.”

In cases of major discrepancy, “it’s always reality that’s got it wrong.”

In the same article, Trump claims, “They have 57 cities throughout the world that have them.” Fifty-seven? Hmm. That number has a familiar flavor, does it not?

Gregory Quenell

Paul Smiths