The meanings of words such as honor, sacrifice, and humility have been leaking away from American civic life like red blood cells from an anemic. But if there’s one place where they 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.
If President Trump’s ambition is realized, a triumphal arch will thrust its way into this murmuring conversation like a boastful bore crashing into a huddle of friends swapping stories about a loved one at a wake. Heavy-handed and overbearing, it would pervert the significance of this uniquely meaningful place, forcing visitors to see these two sites through a crass and generalized assertion of victory and triumph. It will interfere with the bond between Lincoln and his troops and, by extension, the bond between America’s precious, hard-won democratic government and those who have been willing to lay down their lives to defend it.
Trump wants to erect his arch at Memorial Circle, a rotary you come to from the Lincoln Memorial after crossing the Potomac River on Arlington Memorial Bridge. The arch is to be 250 feet high, more than twice as high as the Lincoln Memorial. It will feature gilded statuary, a winged Lady Liberty–like figure on top, and the inscriptions One Nation Under God on one side and Liberty and Justice for All on the other. The project was approved by one key federal commission on May 21 and goes before another on Thursday, but it also faces a lawsuit filed by Vietnam War veterans.
Some opponents of the arch are convinced it will never go ahead. But pink surveyors’ flags were already planted in the grass at Memorial Circle on Memorial Day, when I walked the stretch from Lincoln through the cemetery, hoping to imagine how Trump’s proposal would play against Washington’s carefully choreographed civic spaces. At the high point of the cemetery sits Arlington House, once the home of Robert E. Lee. The view between this and the Lincoln Memorial creates a link between North and South, symbolizing reconciliation after the Civil War.
At mid-morning, amid light rain and fog so thick that it delayed flights out of nearby Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the Washington Monument was mostly invisible. A smattering of protesters on the Lincoln Memorial side of the Potomac held up signs for pedestrians and passing cars. They’d erected a mock arch, about 15 feet high, cut from white cloth and emblazoned with blue lettering: 86 TRUMP’S ARCH. Across the bridge at Memorial Circle, Paul A. Romano III, a retired federal law-enforcement officer wearing a green Vietnam Veteran cap, told me that the day the construction crews arrive, “I’ll be like the guy in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square.” (Romano plans to testify against the arch at Thursday’s meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission.)
Inside the cemetery, some roads had been cut off to secure the site for the imminent arrival of the president and vice president. I paused to watch the motorcade go by before crossing into Section 60, where the road was lined with a dozen or so cars bearing plates reading Combat Wounded and Gold Star. As the president prepared to speak in the Memorial Amphitheater, families had gathered with friends in folding chairs around flower-strewn headstones. They had brought coolers and food baskets, and, by the orientation of their chairs and their warm, relaxed demeanor, it was clear that each enveloped gravestone represented a person made present—someone the visitors wished both to honor on a meaningful day and, out of love, to include in a family picnic.
As I stepped back, the long rows of white headstones, each with their small American flag planted in front, had their overwhelming effect. Surely no arch, no matter how tall, could measure up to the somber beauty—the profundity—of this place?
History can serve as a guide for how we ought to understand the spatial conversation designed to take place between Arlington and the Lincoln Memorial. In 1862, Lincoln visited Sharpsburg, Maryland, where Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain watched the president review his troops, noting that the commander in chief and his soldiers seemed joined by a “mystic bond, wonderful in its intensity.”
“We could see the deep sadness in the President’s face and feel the burden on his heart,” he wrote, “thinking of his great commission to save this people and knowing that he could do this no otherwise than as he had been doing, by and through the manliness of these men.”
Contrast this with Trump, who, in 2018, rejected a proposal to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris, saying, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” Trump, who received a medical deferment (for bone spurs in his feet) during the Vietnam War, also described the more than 1,800 Marines who died at Belleau Wood as “suckers”; attacked the parents of Humayun Khan, an Army captain killed in Iraq; and poured contempt on Senator John McCain for having been captured during the Vietnam War.
Chamberlain’s Civil War account reveals the space between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery as charged not only with honor and pride but also with grief. Lincoln’s memorial embodies the humility of a commander in chief who lived as his troops were dying because of his decisions, and now honors their loyalty and sacrifice. And the war dead, in turn, honor his leadership, the principles they shared, and the sacrifice that Lincoln, too, would make so soon after theirs, on April 15, 1865.
The defenders of Trump’s arch say the enormous structure won’t block the sight lines connecting these two significant sites. Rather, it will frame them: You’ll still be able to see from one to the other through the arch. But this is misleading.
First, it will be true only from very specific vantage points, mostly close to the arch. From Lee’s house, the arch will certainly block the view of the Lincoln Memorial. Second (and more important), to frame something is to impose meaning on it. In this case, a fragile, sacred conversation about sacrifice will be framed—and corrupted—by a shallow rhetoric of triumph.
Trump has been doing this for years, hasn’t he? Interfering with and reframing our vision, trying to make us mistrust our own eyes and to see in all he does nothing but winning. “We’re going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning,” he’s frequently said. We saw what happened on January 6, 2021: a mob attacking police officers, invading the U.S. Capitol, interfering with democracy and threatening people’s lives. But thanks to Trump’s 2024 victory, we are now forced to see January 6 reframed as a “day of love.” We have to see these vandals, whom the president has called “great patriots,” “peaceful people,” and “hostages,” through a scrim of pardons and proposed compensation funds.
Triumphant rhetoric is always pinched. It leaves out the perspective of the vanquished. (In ancient Rome, the vanquished used to be paraded in chains under triumphal arches.) And it imposes brittle, jingoistic meanings on so many deaths that are senseless or, at the very least, difficult to explain.
Before dying himself, seven days before the end of World War I, Wilfred Owen wrote witheringly of “the old Lie”—“Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori”—that “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” You would not tell this lie “with such high zest,” he wrote, to “children ardent for some desperate glory” if you could see what it is really like to die in war—to “watch the white eyes writhing” in the soldier exposed to mustard gas or hear “the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / obscene as cancer.”
Part of being modern, and wise, is about grasping the ways in which Owen was right. It’s about understanding that presidential speeches, even by Lincoln, may be inscribed into stone or livestreamed around the world, but they remain just words. We seek meaning; we try to rationalize, but that meaning can seem paltry, especially to loved ones, in comparison with amputated limbs, crippling PTSD, or death—death that may have come by disease, friendly fire, or training accidents, or in the course of an ill-conceived war.
What’s extraordinary is that, even knowing all of this, people are still willing to die to protect this country and defend its values. In that willingness lies their honor and their heroism. What they deserve is not some cheap and unoriginal assertion of “victory” but our thanks, our admiration, and a redoubling of our efforts to safeguard peace and security.
Triumphal arches are thuggish. They’re the architectural equivalent of a domestic abuser standing, arms crossed, legs athwart, in front of the bedroom door. I prefer the democratic, American tradition of modest, respectful, open-air monuments. I love going to Concord battle site, just west of Boston, where the American Revolution kicked off, and seeing kayakers paddling beneath the Old North Bridge and cyclists standing quietly at the foot of The Minute Man statue by Daniel Chester French (the same sculptor responsible for the figure of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial). I love Antietam, a big, rolling field where you can imagine what happened on September 17, 1862, without anyone mediating or prescribing your response.
Psychologizing Donald Trump has become boring; psychology is made interesting by human depth and complexity. But what is the psychology of a nation that feels the need to put up triumphal arches? Isn’t it usually a symptom of insecurity on the part of those in power?
The Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which Trump has said inspired his idea for an arch in Washington, was the idea of Napoleon Bonaparte’s imperial government. But the arch was far from finished when Napoleon was defeated and sent into exile. It was completed over three decades under three different styles of government. Each regime—imperialist, absolute monarchist, and constitutional monarchist—manipulated the rationale behind the arch to try to cement its own legitimacy. But none of those regimes lasted.
If an arch had been erected in Washington at the end of World War II, when American troops had heroically defeated European fascism and imperial Japan, it might have made some sense. But it seems the Greatest Generation didn’t need to erect triumphal arches, preferring instead to treasure the memory of dead comrades and put resources into rebuilding Europe and Japan, neutralizing the Soviet Union, and securing peace.
The significance of places and monuments can be belied by their names. Shiloh, for instance, is a Hebrew word meaning “place of peace.” But Shiloh, the site of one of the first great battles of the Civil War, was a place of carnage. It had about the same number of French casualties as Waterloo—close to 24,000. “And yet when it was fought,” said the historian Shelby Foote in Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War, people couldn’t have known that “there were another 20 Waterloos to follow.”
Trump’s arch risks a similar fate. Will future generations associate it with winning, as Trump clearly intends? Or will they associate it with insecurity and bluster, and perhaps a more generalized shame—the shame of a nation that twice elected a man judged by his former chief of staff, the retired Marine General John Kelly (whose Marine-officer son, Robert M. Kelly, gave his life in Afghanistan and is buried in Section 60) as “a person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about.”
*Illustration sources: NCPC / Harrison Design; iStock / Getty; Sergej Borzov / Getty; Erik McGregor / LightRocket / Getty.