For many gauging the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the end of Fourth of July festivities headlined by the president of the United States was a relief. Rather than using the nation’s bully pulpit to uplift and unify, he vilified fellow Americans with different political views as “communists,” misquoted the Declaration of Independence, trotted out aging, possibly unwitting wartime veterans as political props and unleashed a bombastic and expensive fireworks display that suggested World War III, not a national celebration.
In a predictable culmination of the Fourth in the Age of
Trump, the president of the United States in his address on the National Mall
in Washington, D.C., reduced veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam to conveniently
timed bit parts while conflating their sacrifice and courage in faraway venues
with his own as he voiced his determination to please his people and give his
Fourth of July speech despite lightning and thunder. “If they can storm the
beaches on D-Day,” he boldly told Fox News, “I can deliver a speech.”
Fearful of the approaching midterm elections and the prospect
of Democrats taking over one or both houses of Congress, the Republican president
repeatedly suggested that his political opponents were homefront communists seeking
to take over the country. At one point, he ad-libbed recklessly, counting on either
the ignorance or the easy manipulation of dulled MAGA minds in his audience:
“And as our Declaration of Independence tells us, we are all made in the image
of one almighty god. And a communist will never say that. That's for sure.”
Indeed, no intelligent communist would say this – nor
would any red-blooded American who knew what he was talking about. The
Declaration of Independence says nothing at all like this. Author Thomas
Jefferson was a well-known skeptic of organized religion and a primary advocate
of the separation of church and state, recognizing from history the frequent prostitution
of religion in the service of tyrants. Wittingly or not, the president of the
United States mined biblical text, not our nation’s foundational text, to malign,
deceive and inflame.
And the MAGA crowd before him cared not a bit. They cheered
in their denial, ignorance and hatred, completing the picture of America’s sad,
delusional decline and fall.
Meanwhile, amid rockets’ red glare some of us wondered whether
our republic would survive two and a half more years of this president, given
his efforts to strike down by command parts of the Constitution he dislikes
(and some Supreme Court justices’ willingness to accommodate him); armed,
masked federal agents lawlessly arresting and shooting people, citizens and
non-citizens alike; and possible passage of a law that would heap hardships on
voters, especially if they “accidentally” get bumped off voter rolls and lack a
passport or birth certificate.
“The dream of democracy is not dying – it’s really dead,” a
New York Times subscriber opined in an otherwise lively online discussion among
readers (including me) about films representing the American experience. “Our
country always had a dirty underside, but the dirt is everywhere now. The
country this movie is about is gone. We call this the United States, but this
is another, starker, crueler and more corrupt country now. I will not celebrate
the Fourth – my country didn’t make it to 250. This is a new country, only a
few years old, and nothing to be proud of.”
Yet the Trump-styled Fourth isn’t over. There’s the matter
of what his administration sometimes touts as the “Independence Arch,” which the
president plans to impose on what many veterans view as sacred ground – that
strategically designed stretch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington
National Cemetery. Australian-born art critic Sebastian Smee argues in The Atlantic that the
arch would further undermine the meaning of the words “honor,” “sacrifice”
and “humility” which “have been leaking away from American civic life
like red blood cells from an anemic.”
To quote Smee, “if there’s one place where they [those
words] retain their rich, sticky, life-giving force, it’s surely in the air
around the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The cemetery is
where Americans remember those who sacrificed their lives for the nation. The
memorial is where they remember their greatest president – the man who
proclaimed an end to slavery and kept the union intact, though the cost was
staggering. The air between these two places is the medium through which
Lincoln gets to speak with his war dead, and vice versa.”
This is a historically and patriotically relevant insight. The
arch would sit within Memorial Circle, between the Lincoln Memorial and
Arlington National Cemetery. “This 250-foot structure would permanently
transform the view from the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington National Cemetery,
one of the most sacred landscapes in America, where families visit fallen
veterans every day,” Alexandra DeCandia wrote to a see-nothing/hear-nothing federal
commission stocked with Trump appointees poised to approve his arch. “Once that
view is gone, it is gone forever.”
Indeed, one simple way to gauge our democracy’s durability hinges
on our nation’s war dead and those who claim to revere them. Of 1,700 comments submitted
by Americans this spring to the National Capital Planning Commission, 99 percent
condemned the president’s “triumphal arch” as an affront to the city’s meticulously
planned and placed monuments. One argued that “allowing the current
administration to continue to build lawlessly, selfishly and haphazardly is
against our democratic principles and what the vast majority of Americans want.”
Nor has the president exactly helped validate his arch,
modeled after Paris’ Arc de Triomphe. During an Oct. 15, 2025, Oval
Office press conference, when a reporter examining a model of the arch asked
who it was for, the president replied: “Me.” The remark was not forgotten,
especially after other presidential appointees targeted the district’s
performing arts center, dedicated by federal statute to the memory of the late President
Kennedy; they renamed the place the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy
Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.
It took the federal judiciary to order on May 29 that Trump’s
name be promptly removed with District Judge Christopher Cooper reminding the
president that “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name and only Congress can
change it.” Which is no doubt why the president doesn’t want Congress trifling with
his erection of a gargantuan, kitsch-endowed, European-styled, humble-yourselves, imperial arch
near a cemetery abundantly populated by Americans who served and in some cases perished
for a constitutionally run democratic we-the-people republic.
Beyond an offhand remark that the arch would honor himself,
the president has supported the monument because, to quote him, Washington,
D.C., is “the only important and major city that doesn't have one.” Yet the Arc
de Triomphe honoring the fighting French soldiers of the French Revolutionary
and Napoleonic wars was commissioned in 1806 by self-crowned, self-important French Emperor
Napoleon I; Rome's Arch of Titus, which in turn influenced the Paris arch,
sought deification of late Roman Emperor Titus. Question: Is there a pattern
here?
While the president’s men have more recently claimed the
arch marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,
doubts remain. Charles Ray, a veteran of 20 years’ service, including two tours
in Vietnam, argued in comments formally submitted to the commission that the
arch “is a garish tribute to one man's vanity and has no place in a democracy
of, by and for the People. If you have a scintilla of love and respect for this
country and the people whose blood has kept it free for 250 years, you will
disapprove this vanity project.”
“This design is ugly, it is grandiose, it is unoriginal and it just gets in the way,” Fran Bowman wrote. “What is it a monument [to] other than the failed Trump presidency? The survival of our republic for 250 years is enough of a monument for me.” Of what she labeled “a monstrous vanity project to please Trump,” Jane Allison added: “He is destroying the beautiful city of Washington, D.C., with monuments to himself. The people used to have a say in this. Trump doesn't get to spend taxpayer money and junk up the city any way he wants.”
“No one should have to experience the desecration of their
loved one's grave in such a heinous fashion,” Nancy Bailey Stone wrote. “When
my parents were buried at Arlington, I had the consolation that, in perpetuity,
their burial place would be one of care and a place where others would find
solace. The homage to a man who received multiple deferrals from serving during
the war in Vietnam is a disgrace to the men and women in the armed forces who
are buried at Arlington. He has no respect for them on any level.”
And Candace Shy Hooper, whose parents are buried in
Arlington National Cemetery, fears the arch if built will “shatter the calm,
quiet atmosphere of Arlington Cemetery.” She too ponders what it actually
commemorates: “It is not needed to celebrate or commemorate any of this
country's triumphs – there are monuments to all the wars in Washington and
throughout the nation. And it is utterly foreign to the memory of the men and
women buried there who fought in those wars because of their dedication to our
founding principles, not for posthumous glory.”
Others wondered why the president wasn’t focused on the pressing
issues that won him the presidency in 2024. “Last and not least,” former D.C.
resident Carolyn Lewis wrote, “Americans are struggling to put food on the
table, find affordable healthcare and housing and find employment that provides
a living wage. Time and attention should instead be put towards the American
public. To spend such resources on a monumental [arch] is a disservice to the
ideals that members of the military who now lay at rest in Arlington Cemetery
fought for.”
A lawsuit filed by three Vietnam veterans and an architectural
historian challenges efforts by the president’s men to bypass the usual congressional
approval process: “Although members of the public will undoubtedly hold diverse
views about whether, where and how a commemorative arch should be built, the
statutorily required procedure is designed to take account of those views
through the participation of Congress. Requiring defendants to follow that
procedure, then, redounds to the benefit of all Americans, whether or not they
share plaintiffs’ concerns.”
The litigants also note in legal filings that “[f]rom the
city’s inception as a purpose-built capital, careful attention was given to the
aesthetic and symbolic significance of the configuration of buildings and
landmarks within the city’s core.” They argue that “construction of the planned
arch in Memorial Circle has no foundation in a grant of statutory authority.
And without congressional authorization, it would transgress specific
prohibitions in the Commemorative Works Act.”
The four cite the grand urban design of Pierre Charles
L’Enfant, the artist, engineer and former military officer commissioned by
President Washington to design the new capital. In his designs, L’Enfant “strove
to embody American ideals, including the principle that ‘every citizen was
equally important.’ Notably, ‘instead of reserving the grandest spot for the
leader’s palace as was customary in Europe,’ L’Enfant’s plan centered the city
on Congress, placing it ‘on a high point with a commanding view of the
Potomac.’”
All of which is lost on a president ignorant or dismissive of
history, let alone the democratic and spatial genius in L’Enfant’s design of the
“Federal City.” I spent a broiling summer day in 2009 hiking among the
monuments and memorials, drawing patriotic inspiration from how most related to
one another, the result of respectful lawmakers and designers building on L’Enfant’s
concepts through the ages. The only significant outlier seemed the Jefferson
Memorial, but, given Jefferson’s sometimes shocking (to this day) beliefs, that
too seemed fitting.
Would the triumphal arch fit into all this deliberative D.C.
planning? Maybe, but not amid the peaceful, contemplative air of Arlington
National Cemetery – and hardly on the impulse of a man who, as of July 23,
boasted we'd lost only 18 lives in a "skirmish" against Iran and who himself
repeatedly dodged the draft. Nor did his regime help matters by lowering the official
death toll from 18 to 14, excluding four U.S. soldiers killed after "Trump
declared an April ceasefire." Sensitive to casualties on his watch, Trump touted
the toll as “18 in two wars.”
Furthermore, the arch's stated purpose is “to celebrate the
triumphs of the American people, inspire patriotism and beautify the nation’s
capital,” yet the president's July rants in which he slanders millions of Americans
who disagree with him politically as “communists” should cast doubt on his motives.
What’s more, during a July 22 rally in Georgia, he argued that American greatness
was assured only so long as he endures: "Ladies and gentlemen of Georgia,
the golden age of America is upon us. We're in the golden age. This is the
greatest we'll ever be."
The veterans’ lawsuit also notes the work of architects and
urban planners on the McMillan Commission, charged in 1901 with updating the
capital’s monumental core in line with L’Enfant’s vision. This included not
only a magnificent monument to President Lincoln to serve as the western anchor
along a major east-west vista that included the Washington Monument and the
Capitol but also a bridge connecting the base of the Lincoln Memorial to
Arlington National Cemetery – a founding vision imperiled by advocates of Arc
de Trump.
The president’s attorneys counter that Congress authorized
construction of large structures on Columbia Island – site of Memorial Circle
before one enters the cemetery – in the 1920s, along with authority to modify planners’
original designs. The proposed arch is merely a continuation of a more modest
project that was never completed. The Commemorative Works Act, they argue – “if
applicable at all – merely requires ‘express authority of Congress’ to build
structures. That authority has already been given to build large structures on
Columbia Island.”
Except that the sketches approved a century ago by Congress envision
nothing as overwhelming or obtrusive as a 250-foot arch overshadowing Arlington
National Cemetery. The original plans propose placing two ornamental columns to
frame the view of the Lincoln Memorial, the latter completed in 1922.
The president’s arch would hinder that view. Consequently, the Report of the
Arlington Memorial Bridge Commission of 1924 calls for two 166-foot-tall
columns to be placed about 300 feet apart.
“Arlington [National Cemetery] is not a backdrop, a branding
opportunity or a place for self-glorification,” New Hampshire tourism guide Meg
Cowan told the National Capital Planning Commission at its July 9 meeting. “To
impose this arch there would be, in my opinion, a desecration of the memory of
our war dead. A 250-foot occupied arch with elevators, ticketing, restrooms,
programming space and an observation deck would create a spectacle and a
pressure point in a place that demands restraint. This project would not honor
that landscape. It would desecrate it.”
Cowan added: “I have worked in New Hampshire tourism for
more than 40 years, including as a tour guide in the White Mountain National
Forest. I know what happens when a place becomes a required stop: Buses arrive,
crowds gather, traffic backs up, trash appears, restrooms and walkways are
strained and the place itself starts serving the attraction instead of the
other way around. That may be manageable in a large recreation area designed
for visitors. It is entirely wrong for the solemn civic and commemorative
landscape near Arlington National Cemetery and the nation’s memorial core.”
Yet despite overwhelming spoken and written testimony opposing
the arch, the National Capital Planning Commission – chaired by White House staff
secretary Will Scharf and stocked with the president’s “yes men” – ignored pleas
for congressional authorization and voted preliminary approval on July 9. Thus we
witness the MAGA Deep State at work, leapfrogging the rule of law and ignoring constitutional
checks and balances to please an 80-year-old imperial president who demands a
monument without legislative or legal scrutiny.
Since then, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation – another group stocked with Trump appointees – has moved to nix a legal hurdle in the National Historic Preservation Act and thus greatly expedite arch construction. With the National Capital Planning Commission’s final approval all but assured in September and Congress effectively AWOL, only three Vietnam veterans and a historian block what, on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, increasingly seems a regal display of what the signers resolved to fight in 1776.
And if the Arc de Trump survives efforts to halt its construction in that mystic stretch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, one can be sure many will one day view it as commemorating the Make America Great Again movement, including its subversion of the legislative branch in ways that our founders never imagined; the ideological corruption of our highest jurists; and, to quote Edward Gibbon in 1776 in a classic postmortem of another failed republic, the passing from the people of “that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger and the habit of command.”
Bill Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor.
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