When asked who the arch honors, Trump seems to have answered “Me.”
Since at least October, President Trump has promoted a plan to build a massive victory arch in the traffic circle at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery, on the Virginia side of the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac River. On April 9 he formally submitted the design to his mostly hand-picked members of the Commission of Fine Arts. The arch would be the largest of its type in the world, towering roughly 250 feet tall and dwarfing the Lincoln Memorial just across the bridge.
The design is heavy with gold, flanked by four golden lions. The name has changed several times — victory arch, independence arch, and most recently “Triumphal Arch” — but the confusion in branding reflects a deeper confusion of purpose. What is clear is what the monument is not: it is not a monument of humble gratitude to fallen soldiers. It sits at the entrance to a national cemetery and within sight of the Iwo Jima Memorial, both dedicated to the service and sacrifice of those who fought for the country. This arch would be dedicated to the man who sent the latest round of Americans to die.
The Memorial Bridge was designed to symbolize the reunification of North and South after the Civil War, linking the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington. Trump’s arch would shatter that composition, inserting a monument to personal triumph into a landscape of national mourning. Critics have compared it to something one might expect in Pyongyang. But the most apt comparison was made in 1819 by Percy Shelley in his “Ozymandias”:
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
