By Daniel Sipes
Tuesday, August 04, 2026
In 2005, conservative essayist Charles Krauthammer praised the monuments on the National Mall for being
dedicated to “the power and glory of ideas.” “Other capitals celebrate the gloria
and fortuna of victory,” he wrote. “No Arch of Triumph here.”
Krauthammer was boasting; at the time, a monument celebrating simple power and
dominance seemed fundamentally un-American.
It is an attitude that goes back to the country’s
founding. Suspicion of monarchical imagery led even the Washington Monument to be delayed for almost a
century following its proposal as part of Pierre L’Enfant’s plan for
Washington, D.C. Congress threw out the original idea, an equestrian statue
portraying Washington as a military leader. Debates raged on for almost a century. Everyone agreed that the
monument had to be built in a “national style,” but no one could agree on what
that style was—a particularly American conundrum that led John Quincy Adams to lament, “Democracy has no monuments.” When the monument was
finally built, it was because a rogue Army Corps of Engineers lieutenant named
Thomas Casey decided to approach the job as a technical project rather than an
artistic one, resulting in the plain, unadorned obelisk Americans know and love
today.
More than 140 years later, President Donald Trump has
announced a plan to build a 250-foot-tall “United States Triumphal
Arch” on the Virginia side of the Arlington Memorial Bridge. The plan calls for
the arch to be topped by golden eagles and a golden Lady Liberty—the original
design included golden lions, which were scrapped after the agency with
oversight of the project pointed out they were not native to the U.S.—and bare of
inscription other than one line from the Pledge of Allegiance, written in gold
letters. If built, it would be the tallest triumphal arch in the world, 88 feet
taller than the Arc de Triomphe and 151 feet taller than the Lincoln Memorial.
The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a seven-member body
filled with Trump appointees, signed off on the project in May, and the
National Capital Planning Commission—another committee whose president, vice
president, and commissioner were all appointed by Trump—gave it preliminary approval on July 9.
A group of Vietnam War veterans has sued to stop the project on the grounds that the arch
would block the view, which symbolizes unity after the Civil War, between the Lincoln
Memorial and Arlington House, the former home of Robert E. Lee around which
Arlington Cemetery was built. A group of congressional Democrats joined the lawsuit, arguing that the monument needs to be
approved by Congress before it can be built. The National Park Service has also
listed more than three dozen other historic sites where sightlines or views
would be affected by the presence of the proposed structure. But less has been
said about the arch itself. Scholars who have studied American monuments say it
would be a complete departure from the tradition of and meaning behind such
edifices.
“The big triumphalist arches were quite deliberately
never built on the mall,” James E. Young, a professor of English and Judaic and
Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst who has
consulted internationally on memorials and was a jury member for the National
9/11 Memorial selection committee, told The Dispatch. “The mall was a
space more for democratic reflection and the break away from imperialism and
conquerors and empires.”
Although America has no shortage of military monuments,
America’s greatest monuments tend to portray our leaders in poses of quiet
contemplation, an approach Young describes as “self-effacing and democratic.”
Thomas Jefferson gazes off into the distance, holding a rolled piece of paper
meant to convey his stature as a man of letters; Abraham Lincoln is seated,
with one hand open and the other closed to illustrate the inner turmoil of a man who fought a war to
save the Union. Both monuments contain inscriptions of large volumes of
speeches and writing, elevating those ideals to the same plane of remembrance
as the men themselves.
“The Washington Monument is … about the Revolutionary
War, but it’s really about the founding ideals of this country, as is the
Jefferson Memorial. The Lincoln Memorial is kind of about the Civil War, but
it’s also more about sacrifice, unification, equality,” said Lisa Benton-Short,
an urban geographer and author of The National Mall: No Ordinary Public
Space.
Many recent American monuments eschew the notion of
triumph altogether. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a human-scale, minimalist
monument, offers a somber meditation on loss of life in a war that
could not be counted as a victory. Later memorials, like the Korean War
Veterans Memorial and the National 9/11 Memorial, have followed its example of
being places of remembrance rather than celebration.
The World War II Memorial, built in 2004, drew criticism because of its triumphalist wreaths and
eagles. (Krauthammer called it a “busy vacuity.”) But that memorial celebrated a
specific victory, and its architect, Friedrich St. Florian, defended the design by noting its relatively small size.
“Nazi and Fascist architecture … was grotesquely immense. But the truth is that
the Triumphal Arch in Paris is 150 feet tall, and [the World War II Memorial
is] 43 feet tall.” In contrast, Trump has boasted that his arch would be larger than the Arc de
Triomphe. “I’d like it to be the biggest one of all,” he told reporters in
January. “We’re the biggest, most powerful nation.”
Although the proposed arch does not—and cannot, because
the 1986 Commemorative Works Act prohibits
monuments to living persons on federal land—have Trump’s name on it, the sense
that it comes as part of a broader effort by Trump to commemorate himself is
inescapable.
“Unlike every other monument in Washington … what’s
really commemorated here is the person who put up the arch, even if their name
isn’t on it,” Kirk Savage, an art and architecture professor at the University
of Pittsburgh and author of Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National
Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape, told The
Dispatch.
One reason for this point of view is the concept of the
triumphal arch itself, having originated in ancient Rome to celebrate victorious
generals. Later, during Rome’s imperial period, emperors restricted the
construction of arches to commemorate only themselves as part of an effort to
consolidate political power. These arches, like the Arch
of Constantine, served to simultaneously create a sense of military power
and reinforce the emperor’s dominion over the land. Later triumphal arches
carry on this tradition. Napoleon commissioned the Arc de Triomphe to
commemorate his victory over Austrian and Russian forces at Austerlitz, and the
monument bears an image of him wearing a crown. But Trump’s arch
officially celebrates no military victory or leader.
“[Trump’s arch] is unusual,” Benton-Short said, “because
it’s borrowing an architectural style that’s associated with military triumph,
but the proponents argue that this is really about American success, American
greatness.”
One reason it’s hard to separate the arch from Trump
himself is the way he has pursued other projects in Washington, D.C. He tried unsuccessfully to add his name to the Kennedy Center, demolished
the White House’s East Wing to make way for a 22,000-square-foot ballroom, and displayed plaques celebrating himself and castigating
former presidents in the West Wing. “What we’re seeing is these monumental
spaces and structures being turned into pretty overt vehicles for
self-promotion,” Savage said.
During an April press conference, press secretary
Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the arch would celebrate America’s 250th
anniversary and the “enduring triumph of the American people.” But when
reporters asked Trump who the arch was for, he pointed at himself and said, “Me.”
If one interprets the arch—based on centuries of history
and Trump’s own affinity for vanity projects—as a celebration of Trump, it
becomes all the more unprecedented. The National Mall contains many monuments
to presidents, but none were built by the presidents themselves. “We see this
[self-monumentalizing] done by leaders mostly in non-democratic countries,”
Benton-Short said.
Indeed, the most recent example of the construction of a
triumphal arch is the 1989 Victory Arch in Baghdad, commissioned by Saddam Hussein.
The next most recent arch—also modeled on the Arc de Triomphe—is the 1982 Arch
of Triumph in Pyongyang, North Korea. The Victory Arch commemorates
Hussein’s self-proclaimed victory in the Iran-Iraq War, which ended in
stalemate, while Pyongyang’s arch commemorates the 70th birthday of
President Kim Il-Sung and contains
a stone for every day of his life to that point.
Of course, the architects and art historians involved in
the approval process for Trump’s triumphal arch don’t see it as an
anti-democratic monument to a sitting president. To them, it represents, if
anything, a return to a more democratic style of architecture: the neoclassical
style. Justin Shubow, who presented the idea for the arch to Trump last year, runs a
nonprofit called the National Civic Art Society, which dedicates its efforts
to “advancing the classical tradition in architecture, urbanism, and their
allied arts.” Rodney Mims Cook Jr., the Trump-appointed chair of the Commission
of Fine Arts, is another longtime proponent of classical architecture who
previously built a triumphal arch called Millennium Gate in Atlanta.
(That arch is similar to Trump’s proposed project in that it is located in the
middle of a busy thoroughfare, though Millennium Gate is considerably more
urban—its neighbors include an Ikea and a Target.) Shubow argues that classical architecture, preferred by the
founders of this country as well as the founders of democracy, better
represents American values than the modernist style that has replaced it in
monuments and federal buildings. (And it’s true that modern architecture originated in the Bauhaus, an early 20th-century
architectural school in Germany that called itself a “cathedral of socialism.”)
But architectural historian and Virginia Tech professor
Bryan Clark Green responds on aesthetic grounds: “This has nothing to do with
an opposition to classicism at all,” he said. “[The arch] is just a misusing of
it. It’s using it in a brute force way, and not paying attention to scale, and
not paying attention to setting.”
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose interest in
architecture found an outlet in Washington as well as New York, said
that “Design activity and political thought are indivisible.” But the political
thought behind Trump’s arch—with its military roots, triumphalist style, and
autocratic parallels—seems no more American than the modern architecture it
seeks to subvert. “We’re shifting our center of gravity from shared civic
meaning and difficult projects and complex conversations into this
leader-centered symbolism,” Benton-Short said.
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