There’s always a local angle when our “local” is right here, and that’s certainly the case with President Donald Trump’s proposed triumphal arch—dubbed the “Arc de Trump”—in Washington, D.C.
In fact, the would-be edifice was first proposed by classicist architectural critic Catesby Leigh in The American Mind, the online publication of The Claremont Institute. This is the contrarian local organization that unites the real Claremont Colleges under one motto: “It has nothing to do with us!”
It’s true that much of what is published in TAM is crackpot poppycock. A recent piece, “Toward a Sexual Counter-revolution,” by an Idaho professor, blames “our regime of compulsory feminism and sexual liberation” for what ails us, noting that before all this “progress” nonsense, “men and women got along well for millennia. It can happen again.”
It can, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
But what Leigh argued for last spring in an article headlined “Washington Needs an Arch: A proposal worthy of the nation’s 250th birthday” was indeed a modest proposal. He spoke of “the need for a monumental arch commemorating the semiquincentennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—an event of universal significance—in our nation’s capital.”
However, because there “is not enough time to erect a permanent one by July 4, 2026,” which is now only months away, Leigh was asking for a “temporary Independence Arch.” This, he argued, “would be the ideal place to start” down the road to something more Napoleonic—along the lines of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris—if future generations wanted to carry on the work.
He cited “a significant, if largely forgotten, tradition of temporary arches in this country.” He found a suitable open site in D.C. and suggested “an arch 60 feet in height and width and 30 feet in depth might achieve the necessary monumental scale.”
He forgot the current president we are, of necessity, dealing with at our nation’s birthday—a man who lives by urban planner Daniel Burnham’s dictum: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
Sixty feet? That’s puny talk. The president has no time for that. He wants 250 feet, towering over the Lincoln Memorial. “Trump’s push to build the giant arch—more than quadrupling its size from original plans—has alienated early proponents of the project, classical architects, and veterans groups who say it will diminish nearby Arlington Cemetery,” The New York Times reports.
“I was proposing a celebratory project,” Leigh said. “An arch of not titanic dimensions; an arch that could be built by July 4, 2026. And if the arch were considered to be of enduring value in its design, then it could be rebuilt in permanent form.”
Size matters to the current president, perhaps after years of being mocked for tiny hands. But it’s not just the scale that differs from the initial unadorned sketch provided by Leigh’s architect friend. Trump’s plans festoon the giant arch with eagles and a gold-plated statue on its top. It calls to mind the Victor Emmanuel II National Monument in Rome, erected to honor a finally united Italy’s first king. It doesn’t seem to be a monument to our nation’s war dead or our history; it’s more Mussolini-esque.
When Trump was asked by a CBS reporter whom the monument was for, he pointed to himself and answered: “Me.”
As press secretaries will do, Karoline Leavitt later tried to clarify that the arch would celebrate “the enduring triumph of the American spirit,” no matter what her boss thinks it would celebrate. This “over the top” approach shouldn’t surprise us from a president who signed an executive order to “Make Federal Architecture Beautiful Again” and whose idea of beauty has a decidedly imperial bent.
Less is never more to a president with a fragile ego.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.