1. The event. Over the weekend, more than 500 trees came down at East Potomac Golf Links, a public golf course in the nation’s capital that has been open since 1925 and is currently the subject of a lawsuit about what it will become. On Monday, a federal judge ordered the work stopped for a day and demanded that a park official appear under oath to answer who gave the order. The judge was described as furious. The trees were described as dead and dangerous. Both descriptions are doing their jobs.

2. The question. Who held the chainsaw is the wrong question, and it is the only question anyone in Washington can answer, which is why it requires a subpoena. A superintendent knows. A regional director knows. Somebody in a chain that runs upward through appointees knows. The answer exists. The answer is simply not being said out loud, in public, by the people who know it, and this is not new — it is the operating system.

3. Both sides, briefly. The right calls the judge’s fury judicial activism: a court pausing tree removal is a court running the National Park Service, and courts running the National Park Service is how you get a country where a judge decides whether a branch is dead. The left calls the weekend’s speed a signal that the lawsuit was never going to be respected, and a lawsuit that gets cut down over a Saturday is a country where paper is decoration. Both sides are correct, and both sides are performing, and the trees, being trees, have no position.

4. What accountability actually costs. A deposition. That’s the whole price. One official, one morning, one transcript. We have spent the week treating that transcript like a constitutional crisis, which tells you the transcript is the most expensive document in America — not because it’s hard to produce, but because producing it means somebody’s name goes in it.

5. The generous reading. The work may have been legitimate. Dead limbs fall on golfers; the course loses money; the renovation debate is real and has been running for years in a court that moves at the speed of paper. A government that cuts dangerous trees on a weekend is a government that noticed the danger. A government that then sends its lawyers to say “expedited” instead of sending its superintendent to say “I ordered it” is a government that noticed the danger and missed the manners.

6. The ungenerous reading. I am told there is one. I will not dignify it here, because this column has a word limit and the trees are gone.

The hearing was Thursday. The transcript, when it comes, will be boring, and the boringness will be the point, and nobody will read it.