Democrats Decry Trump’s ‘Triumphal Arch’ but the Project Is More Than 100 Years in the Making

The Trump administration’s announcement that it is preparing to start excavation work necessary to build a massive triumphal arch at Arlington, Virginia has drawn howls of protests from Democrats but a monument at that site has long been part of a development plan for the capitol area.Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Thursday said that work on the new arch would begin over the next two-week period. “In 1902, the U.S. Senate’s ‘McMillan Commission’ called for ‘a concourse suited to memorial treatment be established’ on the westerly terminus of the Memorial Bridge,” Mr. Burgum said in an X post. He included a 1900 rendering showing a George Keller designed arch on the location.When the committee’s McMillan Plan — a long-term blueprint for design in the national capital — was publicly presented for the first time in 1902, the Sun called it sensible and practical. “Elaborate as the plans of the commission may seem, they are not fanciful, but are designed merely to carry out on a somewhat enlarged scale the original ideas of Washington and L’Enfant when the city was founded,” the paper reported. The L’Enfant Plan’s diagonal streets formed the boundaries of Washington D.C.’s “monumental core.”Elements of the McMillan Plan have been added across the capitol in a piecemeal fashion over the past 120 years. The placement of the Lincoln Memorial and the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial came from the plan. Other central elements of the plan have remained unrealized.The Society of Architectural Historians, however, says the arch design Mr. Burgum referenced predated the commission’s McMillan Plan. The group noted that the final plan called for two 166-foot-tall columns at the location of Mr. Trump’s planned arch.The Commission on Fine Arts, in May, approved the design of the 250-foot arch but the National Capital Planning Commission has not signed off. Last month, Mr. Trump named a new chairman of the commission and the approval is expected to come next month.Democrats jumped on the announcement because construction is not waiting for that final approval. Congressman Don Beyer called it a “vanity arch” on X and claimed the project was “illegal, wildly narcissistic, and would only make traffic gridlock worse.”“Trump won’t lift a finger to help struggling Americans, but for his vanity projects? Suddenly, the sky’s the limit for what he’ll spend- and it’s all at your expense,” Congresswoman Shontel Brown said in an X post.Mr. Trump is not the first president to draw ire for projects that altered elements of the McMillan Plan. The blueprint called for an extensive network of parks to be constructed around the tidal basin. The Great Depression halted those plans, and in 1936, President Roosevelt decided the Thomas Jefferson Memorial should be built along the water.Congress had passed a joint resolution that called for the memorial to be built at the intersection of Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues. The Commission of Fine Arts opposed the relocation of the memorial site, but Roosevelt ordered its construction at the tidal basin anyway.The project faced continued protests, including a march to the White House. Some of the outcry was from people upset over the construction requiring digging up cherry trees along the water. In one protest, a group of women chained themselves to a tree at the construction site in what became known as the “Cherry Tree Rebellion.”The construction continued anyway and Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial on April 13, 1943, the 200th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth.

Democrats Decry Trump’s ‘Triumphal Arch’ but the Project Is More Than 100 Years in the Making

Democrats Decry Trump’s ‘Triumphal Arch’ but the Project Is More Than 100 Years in the Making

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