The Washington Post reported yesterday that the Trump administration is set to begin excavation work at Memorial Circle in Arlington, Virginia, for the planned 250-foot-tall triumphal arch, in the next few weeks.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum made the announcement on X.
“This will be one of the Great Pieces of American Architecture, honoring the history and significance of Arlington [National] Cemetery and befitting the most powerful Capital in the World,” Burgum added.
We all know that this has nothing to do with honoring anything beyond President Trump himself. It will be viewed as nothing more than a product of his vision and his vision only.
The National Park Service’s own review as well as the analysis of countless other institutions, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation, lays out for all to see the damage that it will do to the broader historical and cultural landscape, namely through its undercutting of iconic sight lines.
But make no mistake. That is exactly the goal. The scale of this arch is intended to smother and minimize everything around it. It is intended to dominate your attention and imagination, while in the nation’s capital, and direct it to Donald Trump.
The arch will not honor the men and women buried in Arlington or the most powerful symbol of Union that we have in the nearby Lincoln Memorial. It will be a statement that none of these sacrifices or ideals rises to the importance of one man.
Just ask yourself whether you can identify the administration of any of the major monuments in Washington, DC or anywhere else for that matter. You can’t and the reason you can’t is because our most important commemorative spaces take years, sometimes decades, to come to fruition. We intentionally move slowly to ensure that these spaces reflect the will of the people rather than any one person or political party and even then it is impossible to predict how they will be received by the public.
We rely on the work of review panels and institutions that specialize in historic preservation to represent us in the process. All of this has been bypassed by the Trump administration.
The entire process reflects the will of one individual. It is exactly what you would expect from a man who desires authoritarian control over all of our lives.
There is no shortage of outrage on social media and demands or at least the hope that after the arch it is completed (and I am convinced that it will be completed) a subsequent administration will quickly tear it down.
I wouldn’t be so sure. In fact, I tend to think the confidence or conviction expressed in these statements is entirely misplaced. First, it assumes that the next president will be a Democrat. Even if he or she is, depending on what else transpires in the next two years, the removal of the arch may be far from the top of the list of priorities.
The ease with which people imagine a swift removal also assumes that the Trump years will have been an aberration, that we can just flip a switch and return to something that approaches normalcy. I no longer have any sense of what that even means.
How much political capital will a future president be willing to spend in what will certainly be as divisive an environment as we are currently experiencing? Perhaps not much and the refusal to move on it may even be justified.
The question of the future of the arch, once it is completed, will also ask how far we are willing to go in ignoring the norms that have governed these public commemorative spaces for decades. Are we willing to see these sites politicized even further? Do we want to see each new administration engage in the same sweeping transformation of these spaces? Where does it end?
I don’t claim to have any easy answers.
During my last trip to DC in July, I took a few minutes to sit at the rear of the Lincoln Memorial overlooking Memorial Bridge and Arlington National Cemetery beyond. It’s one of my favorite places to sit and reflect. It’s usually quiet. Relatively few visitors make the trek to this part of the site.
I stared out knowing that it would the last time I would get to enjoy this view.
This didn’t have to happen. In fact, we’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that something like this would never happen. But as we all know, rules, norms, and laws are just words on paper if we don’t have people willing to honor, enforce or stand up for them.
Unfortunately, we elected a man who we knew would not respect the will of the people. It’s a decision that will take generations to undo if we are so willing.
