President Donald Trump’s planned 250-foot triumphal arch would send a creeping darkness across the graves of America’s fallen, stretching over more than 75,000 burial sites at Arlington National Cemetery in a year, according to a new analysis.
The Washington Post built a to-scale 3D model and found the arch’s shadow would touch burial sites on 284 days a year. It would slide over John F. Kennedy’s eternal flame on 18 days, shroud his memorial on 50 and darken the Military Women’s Memorial on 109.
The shade would fall on veterans of the Vietnam War, Korean War, both World Wars, the Spanish-American War and the Civil War, and it would also darken the headstones of formerly enslaved people.
At dusk, the shadow would reach across Arlington Memorial Bridge toward the monuments of the National Mall, cutting across the Lincoln Memorial in fall and winter. On 110 days, it would touch a memorial to an assassinated president. On more than 30 days, it would loom over parts of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and the Reflecting Pool.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle insisted the arch would “enhance the visitor experience” at the cemetery and become “one of the most iconic landmarks,” and the Interior Department claimed its own models showed that while the cemetery is open, only a small section would be affected, for less than two weeks a year.
Interior officials said that happens when shadows are “very lengthened and distorted, and are mingled with the long shadows of trees.” But the 23 pages of simulations the agency provided didn’t explain its methods, and its shadows largely matched the Post’s.
Retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, whose parents are buried at Arlington, called it “a sacrilege.”
“There are a lot of families out there who are going to visit their loved one and just be overwhelmed by the shadow of this vanity project to Trump,” said Eaton, who works with VoteVets.
University of Connecticut historian Micki McElya said the symbolism was “undeniable.” Columbia University’s Karla Rothstein, who teaches on how public spaces can honor the dead, argued that shadows aren’t “inherently negative” but noted that “their source matters” in important ways.
“Perhaps the concern is not so much the presence of shade as what it means for a monument celebrating triumph to impose its shadow on a landscape commemorating sacrifice,” Rothstein said.
Trump has boasted that he “had to have it a little bit larger” than the 164-foot Arc de Triomphe in Paris. A planning commission stacked with his allies could approve the project as soon as Nov. 5, with groundbreaking right after. Meanwhile, a federal judge is weighing a lawsuit from three Vietnam veterans and a preservationist who are seeking an emergency halt.
The arch will also be crowned with its own eternal flame. On some days, including July 28, Jacqueline Kennedy’s birthday, Trump’s flame would burn bright while his arch casts her husband’s flame and grave into shadow.
“I care about that flame,” she said a week after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. “I wanted that flame.”
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