Let us begin with the wait.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced this week that after a very long wait, over 125 years, the government is finally ready to begin excavation for what his announcement calls the Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck. This is presented as the correction of a historical oversight, a promise deferred since roughly the turn of the twentieth century, patiently unfulfilled through two world wars, the Depression, the Cold War, the moon landing, and several entire lifetimes, until one man arrived who alone possessed both the vision to identify Washington’s missing enormous white arch and the will to correct it.
The shape of that claim deserves a moment, because it is doing a great deal of work. It asks you to believe that for a century and a quarter, the capital of the most powerful nation in human history simply forgot to build itself a triumphal arch, the way a person forgets to buy milk, and that the oversight sat there quietly, unaddressed, waiting for the correct temperament to notice it. Nobody in that hundred and twenty-five years lacked the concrete. They lacked the specific psychological need.
There is also the small matter of what a triumphal arch is for. The form has a job. Rome built them to commemorate victories, and Paris built its most famous one to commemorate the men who won Napoleon’s. A triumphal arch traditionally requires a triumph. This one will have to make do with a birthday, and the birthday belongs to a country that has spent the past six months unable to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
The size of the thing
The arch will stand 250 feet tall. For readers doing the math at home, this is more than double the height of the Lincoln Memorial, which stands 99 feet and which the new arch will face directly across the Potomac, in the manner of an extremely tall relative leaning over a smaller one at a family photo, ruining the composition.
The height was chosen because the number matched the anniversary. That is not a design principle. That is a vanity plate.
It will also be, by a comfortable margin, taller than the actual Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the building it is explicitly modeled on, inspired by a 2017 state visit during which the president was reportedly awed by the original. Being awed by something and then building a bigger one is not homage. It is a rebuttal. France spent thirty years building a monument to the armies of Austerlitz and Jena. The reply, two centuries later, is a taller one, on a roundabout, funded in part by people who would prefer not to be named, celebrating the passage of time.
The design has grown considerably since its first appearance. Early versions floated a 76-foot arch, a tidy figure meant to evoke 1776. That version did not survive contact with the client. By October the president was telling reporters aboard Air Force One that he wanted it to be the biggest one of all, on the stated grounds that America is the biggest, most powerful nation, which is an argument that would also justify the world’s largest mailbox, if anyone had thought to propose one, and which he would have approved.
Who it is for
CBS News correspondent Ed O’Keefe asked the obvious question, the one a small child would ask, the one an architecture critic dreams for years of getting to ask a head of state on camera: who is this for?
The president gestured toward himself and said, “Me.”
There is no footnote worth adding to that, because it has already done everything a footnote would do on its own. He was not asked a trick question, and he was not caught in an unguarded moment by a hostile microphone picking up a stray remark. He was handed the single most direct opportunity in the entire project to say something about veterans, or history, or the nation’s 250th birthday, or genuinely anything containing a plural pronoun, and instead produced the one-word, first-person, singular, unambiguous truth of the matter. Every other document connected to this arch, the funding memos, the historical framing, the appeals to national destiny, is built from language engineered to obscure exactly this fact, and he undid all of that engineering himself, on camera, in two letters, because nobody thought to prepare him not to.
The White House later clarified that the arch honors veterans and the 250th anniversary. The clarification arrived after the answer, which is the order these things always arrive in.
The site, and its history
The arch will sit at Memorial Circle, on Columbia Island, at the Virginia end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, directly between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.
That last detail deserves its own sentence. The Military Observation Deck, 250 feet up, gilded, with 360-degree views, will look down onto the graves of roughly 400,000 people who did the actual triumphing. A tourist who has paid for the elevator will be able to see, from a platform on a monument dedicated to a man who said it was for him, the headstones of the people it was supposed to be for.
The president has claimed that this exact roundabout was originally slated, under the 1902 McMillan Plan, to hold a statue of Robert E. Lee. That specific claim traces to the president’s own remarks rather than to the McMillan Commission’s published plan, a distinction better left unresolved than resolved, since a fact can be both unverified and completely in character at the same time. What is verifiable is that the McMillan Plan itself was never formally adopted, that its namesake senator died the year it was published, and that the pieces of it which did eventually get built, the Lincoln Memorial among them, took roughly fifty years from authorization to opening.
The Federal Register puts this one at two to three years. So the 125-year wait ends in a rush job.
Where the design came from
The design did not come from a commission, a competition, or a national conversation about what the country’s semiquincentennial ought to look like in stone. It came from a rendering an architect at a private firm posted online, unsolicited, under the caption that America needs a triumphal arch. The president saw it and wanted it.
That is the entire provenance. A man saw a picture of a building on the internet and decided the country should have it, which is how most of us buy patio furniture and how nobody, until now, has commissioned a national monument.
What the timing says
None of this is happening in a vacuum, and the vacuum is worth naming.
The excavation begins in a month when the national debt has passed $40 trillion, when net interest on that debt now runs close to a trillion dollars a year, when the price of ground beef required a tariff waiver to bring down, and when the single most stable finding in American polling is that affordability, not foreign policy, not immigration, not culture, is the thing keeping people up at night. Thirty-seven percent of the country names the cost of living as the most important problem facing the nation, a number that has not moved in three months. Nobody is polling at thirty-seven percent on the absence of a triumphal arch.
Set beside that number, a monument whose purpose is to be looked at, gilded, from an observation deck, by people who drove there in a car they can increasingly less afford to fill with gas, is not simply a matter of taste. It is a specific kind of tone-deafness that requires real effort to achieve, the kind where a person has to actively decide that the correct response to a nation worried about its grocery bill is a four-story gold lion.
What it will actually say
The arch, per the architectural renderings submitted to the Commission of Fine Arts, will be topped with a winged Statue of Liberty figure and eagles, portions of it gilded, with the phrases “One Nation Under God” and “Liberty and Justice for All” rendered in gold lettering at either side of the top. Four golden lions will flank its base.
Two observations on the iconography. The Statue of Liberty has never had wings, and someone has added them anyway, which turns Liberty into an angel, or a victory, or possibly just a woman who has finally been given the means to leave. And the two inscriptions are fragments of the Pledge of Allegiance, written for schoolchildren in 1892, which means the president is having the words a nine-year-old mumbles at a flag carved in gold at 250 feet, which is roughly the emotional register of tattooing the Boy Scout oath across your own back and calling it a monument.
Gold lettering, golden lions, a gilded winged woman on top of a white marble arch: this is not restrained classicism. This is a wedding cake that has been legally granted eminent domain.
What it will cost, according to whom
The White House has, at various points, declined to name a total cost, stated that a combination of public and private funds will be used, and allowed that the figure is still being calculated. Axios has reported an estimated $100 million, attributed to people who have discussed it with the president directly, one of whom helpfully specified that there is a small arch, a middle arch, and a large arch, and that he prefers the large one, provided it is big and gold and white.
It is worth pausing on the fact that a construction budget for a national monument is being discussed, on the record, in the same vocabulary a person uses to order a coffee. Small, medium, large. He wants a venti.
The financing sits alongside roughly $1.9 billion the president has reportedly raised from private donors across his various construction projects, the same pool of money funding the White House ballroom, which brings us, unavoidably, to the ballroom, and to what the ballroom can tell us about how this arch is likely to go.
The prior work
Before there is an arch, there was an East Wing, and the East Wing is instructive.
The East Wing stood since 1902, was renovated in 1942, and was, according to the president, not going to be affected by his new ballroom project at all. In July 2025 he said the project would not interfere with the current building. By October, crews were photographed tearing down its facade. The stated reason had shifted from a preservation project to a demolition, on the grounds that architects had determined, after tremendous study, that starting over was the better path.
The cost of that ballroom, over the same period, moved from $200 million to $300 million to $400 million, a trajectory that has never once, at any point in this administration’s construction history, moved in the other direction. If the arch follows the same curve, the $100 million estimate currently circulating should be read as an opening bid rather than a forecast.
The demolition itself was later justified on structural grounds: an unstable colonnade, water leakage, mold contamination, the sort of language that appears, with impressive consistency, exactly when a decision has already been made and requires an engineering rationale to catch up to it. The East Wing had apparently been crumbling in place for decades, undetected, until precisely the week a ballroom needed the land it stood on, at which point the building’s century-old structural failings arrived on schedule, like a delivery.
The Kennedy Center underwent a comparable arc this year: a board removed and replaced, a renovation budget approved at $257 million, a two-year closure, options considered running as high as $560 million. A Reflecting Pool renovation was also announced, and floated in the Oval Office via architectural rendering, joining a slate of Washington construction projects that now includes a monument, a ballroom, a performing arts center, and a body of water, all moving simultaneously, all funded through some blend of appropriations and unnamed private generosity, all overseen by an administration that fired six sitting members of the Commission of Fine Arts in October, which is the commission whose entire job is to say no to exactly this kind of thing.
Abolishing the commission would have been the crude move. He kept the commission and removed the people on it who might use it, which is a more efficient design than abolition, and it is the same design as the arch.
What history suggests will happen next
Given the assembled evidence, a reasonable person is entitled to some comedic speculation about how this specific 250-foot structure, gilded, lion-flanked, built on a floodplain-adjacent traffic island by a construction apparatus with a documented habit of discovering structural surprises exactly when convenient, is likely to go.
The safest prediction is delay. A federal court already halted above-ground ballroom work this August pending litigation, a ruling that distinguished above-ground construction from below-ground work in a way that suggests future litigants have found the actual weak point in this administration’s construction strategy, which is that it keeps building the parts nobody can see while arguing about the parts everyone can. A Vietnam veterans group and a historian have already sued to block the arch entirely, on a lawsuit that has not yet been resolved and that the excavation apparently began ahead of anyway, in the manner of a man who orders dessert before the entree has been paid for.
The second safest prediction is a cost revision, upward, announced sometime after enough has been dug that reversing course becomes more expensive than finishing.
And then there is the structural question, which nobody involved seems eager to ask out loud, given the East Wing’s late-discovered mold and the ballroom’s late-discovered colonnade instability. A quarter-mile from the Potomac, in reclaimed parkland, on a traffic circle originally laid out for horse-drawn carriages, a 250-foot gilded structure is going up under the supervision of an administration whose engineering announcements have, without exception, arrived after the wrecking ball rather than before it. If a structural surprise turns up in this arch, it will not be the first time this year that a surprise of exactly that kind appeared precisely when it was needed and never one day sooner.
Whether the arch falls down on its own, or simply stands there being expensive and enormous until somebody with a can of spray paint gets to it first, is genuinely an open question, and I would not want to bet heavily on either outcome arriving before the other. Vandalism generally requires proximity, opportunity, and public access, all three of which an arch on a Virginia traffic circle with a 360-degree observation deck provides in abundance. Structural failure generally requires a construction process this administration has, so far, applied to every large object it has touched. It may genuinely be a coin flip which arrives first, the graffiti or the settling crack, and I suspect the honest answer is that it will be close.
There is a third possibility, and it is the one I would actually put money on. The arch gets built, on time or near it, and it stands, and it is fine, structurally, for decades. And it is simply enormous and gold and in the way, forever, of the view from the Lincoln Memorial to the cemetery that the McMillan Plan spent a century protecting, and every future president who wants to be photographed at Arlington has to decide where to stand so that the gold lions are out of frame.
The arc, and the arch
There is an old idea about a moral arc bending, slowly, toward something better, and I am not going to quote it, because it has been quoted enough and because the man building this monument has never given any indication of believing it applies to him.
What he is building instead is the other kind of arc, the architectural kind, the one that goes up and comes back down in a single unbroken curve, following a shape it cannot alter once the trajectory is set. That is, structurally speaking, the entire principle an arch operates on. It rises under its own momentum and it is caught, at the very last moment, only by the keystone, the single piece that holds the whole ambitious curve from collapsing into rubble.
Watching this project rise out of a hole in the Virginia riverbank, the man building it has spent this entire term testing exactly how far a structure can lean out over open space before something underneath it gives, and everyone currently responsible for the part of the design that actually keeps a curve from collapsing, the courts, the commissions, the appropriators, the allies, has spent that same period being fired, sued, ignored, or quietly removed from the position that mattered.
An arch this size needs no enemy to bring it down. It only needs everyone holding it up to stop, one at a time, without anyone registering which one mattered most.
The excavation started this week. We will see what it finds underneath.
As soon as he and his shitweasels are finally gone, we will need to demolish all of it. Everything he touched needs to be burnt to the ground and remade as it was before he put his grubby little mitts on it.
This Arch is a dam near close replica of Hitlers Arch in Berlin.
So Trump is telling all in America how aligned he is with The Nazi Hitler Regime... and tge GOP Congressional members are all for it.
Dam them all anyway & vote vote vote them all out.