Donald Trump’s vision for a monumental arch in the nation’s capital was always ambitious. He has called for a 250-foot structure clad in granite, with gilded winged statues, an observation deck, a café, a gift shop, and an exhibition space—all to be completed by the end of his second term.
And that was before he decided that the “triumphal arch” should also be a military complex.
Since the project was announced last year, the Trump administration has raced to begin work on the memorial, checking many of the boxes required of a major new building project in D.C. It cleared one key panel, the Commission of Fine Arts, which Trump has stacked with loyalists. It got a sign-off from the Federal Aviation Administration (which has called for a “non-standard eternal flame” on the arch so that pilots can see it at night). Although the project still faces a lawsuit filed by veterans and a preservationist, this week an obscure independent federal agency terminated the project’s ongoing historic-preservation review—an unusual move that pushes the arch significantly closer to final approval. It may get that in November from the National Capital Planning Commission, another federal body that has rubber-stamped several of Trump’s building projects in D.C.
Trump initially made little secret of the actual purpose of the arch, which will rise above Memorial Circle, a traffic roundabout between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. When a model of the structure was first spotted in the Oval Office last October, Trump told journalists that it was meant to honor “me.” After that, however, officials pitched it as a commemorative work for the nation’s 250th birthday. Later, in arguing against the veterans’ lawsuit, the project’s lead agency, the National Park Service, said the arch did not need congressional approval because a 1925 law had already authorized a pair of columns on that end of Memorial Bridge, to symbolize the post–Civil War reconciliation of North and South.
Then, on Sunday, Trump invoked national security, announcing that the structure would house ammunition, drones, and snipers. “There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, D.C., IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH, but it will now and, by far, the greatest of them all!” A White House official told me that the arch would include military infrastructure while also remaining open to the public, and that the newly announced features do not alter the design or review process. The National Park Service and Interior Department did not respond to my questions about the project.
If changing the purpose of the arch was meant to speed construction, it could have precisely the opposite effect. The project was already in its final stages of approval, the pesky matter of the lawsuit notwithstanding. But Trump’s plan to deck out the arch with weapons is likely to involve more agencies, lead to more litigation, and—this might be the important part to Trump—create further delays.
On Thursday, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation announced it had ended the arch’s routine consultation process—known as Section 106—after the National Park Service concluded that it was unlikely to produce an agreement with outside parties providing feedback on the proposal. Although this process isn’t legally binding, officials undertake it for federal construction projects that could affect historic properties, and proponents say it forces agencies to evaluate the effects of their projects and allows the public to have a say. But it can take years.
In this case, it took months before officials ended the process early. Outside parties are supposed to give feedback during the review, but Charles Birnbaum, founder of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, told me his group and other consulting parties were invited to only one meeting. Just days before the president’s announcement on Sunday, Park Service officials sent the consulting groups a proposed memorandum of agreement that acknowledged the arch would unavoidably harm surrounding historic properties, but that concluded the project would move forward as planned. Because the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation has now canceled this process altogether, it will prepare its own formal comments and seek approval from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. That timeline means that the Trump administration could bring the arch before the National Capital Planning Commission in November.
Sara Bronin, a former chair of the ACHP and a professor at the George Washington University Law School, told me that termination of consultation is very unusual and reserved for cases in which parties who have diligently worked to resolve a project’s adverse effects still fail to come to an agreement. During her year as chair, she said, she exercised that authority only one time (for a wind-energy project). “By prematurely terminating consultation on the Triumphal Arch proposed by President Trump, the ACHP and interim chair Travis Voyles are making a farce of the Section 106 process,” she wrote me in an email. “True consultation has never occurred for the Triumphal Arch, and it looks like the Park Service and ACHP will bend over backwards to avoid it.”
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In theory, Bronin said, the arch’s expansion to include national-security infrastructure should actually trigger a new Section 106 process. Previously, the National Park Service determined that the structure would adversely affect historic properties. But that analysis was conducted for a triumphal arch—not a military facility.
Greg Werkheiser, an attorney at Cultural Heritage Partners and a plaintiff in a lawsuit to stop Trump’s plans to paint the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building, said the changing function makes the arch a fundamentally different undertaking from the one preservationist groups have reviewed. “That’s likely to be a legal problem,” he told me in an email. All of this comes after ACHP announced plans to water down the historic-preservation rules that have applied to the arch—which could mean that the next time the Trump administration wants to erect a new monument, it faces less red tape to begin with.
The process for creating new monuments in Washington, D.C., is well understood. But adding drones and ammo to one is a new wrinkle. “There’s no American monument that’s ever been used for that on a permanent basis,” Bryan Clark Green, a former member of the National Capital Planning Commission, told me.
If the arch is to double as a military facility, Green said, the government would need to rethink how people and vehicles enter the site, how military personnel move through the structure, and how the public is kept away from sensitive operations. All of those considerations would require major revisions that would bring the project back before the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission on Fine Art.
Green told me the new arch plans should also trigger another review from the Federal Aviation Administration, which released a final report a week ago determining that the structure “would not pose a hazard to aircraft” even though it sits near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Along with the “eternal flame,” floodlights have been ordered by the agency to illuminate the structure. The FAA did not respond to questions I sent the agency.
The bureaucratic requirements won’t end there. Military construction ordinarily follows its own yearslong planning and budgeting process, involving the Pentagon, the White House, and Congress. Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel who oversaw military-construction budgets for the federal government, told me that he would expect the Department of Defense to contribute at least some money toward military-use portions of the arch—which was already estimated to have a $100 million price tag. The president has claimed that the new changes were a “strong request” from the military. In response to questions I sent, DOD directed me to Trump’s Truth Social post that announced the plans.
[Tom Nichols: Trump’s monumental obsession]
Patrick Suermann, a Texas A&M construction-science professor and retired Air Force officer, was skeptical that the project Trump described is even realistic. “There’s a lot of things that don’t make it very feasible,” he told me.
Some of the biggest obstacles are logistical. The arch would have to accommodate each of the military functions Trump named, Cancian said. Snipers would need suitable positions atop the structure, and ammunition would require secure storage. Suermann pointed to the military’s quantity-distance requirements, which are invisible safety boundaries intended to protect people and sites surrounding where explosives are stored. “If you have full-time ammunition stored there,” he said, “you have quantity-distance arcs that would make it impossible for anybody to ever go near it.” Again, the proposed site is a traffic circle that’s notorious for congestion during rush hour.
In its draft agreement last week, the National Park Service said the project’s location in Memorial Circle was “central to the undertaking” and that relocating the arch would mean it’s not the same project anymore. Trump and his critics disagree on the appropriateness of putting a celebratory arch in the somber shadow of Arlington Memorial Cemetery. But the case for a military installation there is even less clear. There are no federal buildings to guard, the site’s proximity to the airport could potentially complicate drone operations, and it’s also not well suited for snipers.
“The two lines of fire they have are really down the Mall or back at Arlington Cemetery,” Green said. “So exactly what is the threat?”
If anything, the arch could become more of a target.
In deploying his national-security logic, Trump may be hoping to strengthen his case in court, after that argument helped him, to a moderate extent, with his ballroom. With that project, a judge who ordered an aboveground work stoppage allowed subterranean construction to continue because of its military purpose. But there is no established requirement for any kind of military presence in Memorial Circle.
Beyond the practical and the procedural challenges, the military additions sharpen a symbolic tension that has surrounded the arch project. Veterans and military families had already objected to the plans, which they said would dishonor fallen soldiers buried at Arlington National Cemetery, disrupt funeral processions and personal visits, and alter the solemn character of the memorial corridor, given that the arch would block the view from the cemetery to the Lincoln Memorial.
Paul Eaton, a retired Army major general and senior adviser for the veteran-advocacy group VoteVets, described the project to me as “sacrilegious” and said the monument—which would be the tallest arch in the world—would cast a literal shadow over thousands of graves. “This is not something that the United States does,” he told me.
Eaton’s objection is also personal. His father was killed in Vietnam and is buried at Arlington, and he and his wife visit the cemetery whenever they are in Washington. “It is hallowed ground,” he said. Earlier this month, he appeared in a VoteVets video campaign to mobilize more veteran families against the arch. The effort is also supported by Home of the Brave, a political-advocacy group whose leadership is made up of Democrats and Republicans—including former National Security Adviser Susan Rice and former Representative Barbara Comstock. Senator Jeff Merkley, the top Democrat on the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees federal parks, plans to introduce legislation next week that would block federal funding for the arch.
The opposition to the project coincides with growing pushback to Trump’s plans for Washington’s landmarks. He has implied several times that the Kennedy Center may need to be demolished—a possibility that might have seemed absurd if not for Trump’s teardown of the White House East Wing last October.
Trump’s arch plans are forcing critics to take another far-fetched scenario seriously: the possibility of gunfire from a tourist destination on the Potomac River. At the least, Birnbaum, of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, told me he imagines a surreal experience for visitors: “Turn right for the gift shop and turn left for the arsenal.”