Donald Trump is facing multiple challenges. The United States is losing to one of its worst enemies in a war that has left the American economy mired in the sludge of growing inflation and rising energy prices. His popularity is now hovering around second-term George W. Bush levels, and may even be headed for end-stage Richard Nixon numbers. His party faces the prospect of a crushing defeat in midterm elections that are only six weeks away. (In some places, early voting has already begun.) The country, and the 47th president’s administration, are in trouble on every front.
Despite all this military, economic, and political chaos, Trump has stayed true to a handful of projects: Renaming the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, demolishing the East Wing of the White House and replacing it with a ballroom that even the French kings might have thought over the top, and building a triumphal arch in front of the bridge to Arlington Cemetery whose design looks like it was found in the bottom of Albert Speer’s desk drawer.
The president is very concerned about these undertakings. He is, as they say in Washington, laser-focused on them. Ordinary folks might say “obsessed,” because at times he seems unable to talk about anything else, even when asked about matters of national importance, including America’s slow-motion defeat in the Middle East.
Perhaps this world of troubles is why Trump is taking refuge in plans of marble and gilt. Even an emotionally healthier man might want an occasional break from the travails of a presidency in crisis: Harry Truman would retire to the White House balcony with a bourbon, Dwight Eisenhower played a lot of golf, Kennedy and George H.W. Bush loved sailing, Ronald Reagan watched hundreds of movies in the mansion theater and at Camp David.
But Donald Trump is not an emotionally healthy man, and his obsession with monuments is not a mere diversion from the pressures of the job. His most recent tirade—posted at 7:34 this morning on his Truth Social site, some six hours after his last post the night before—suggests a president who is now lost in a fantasy city in his mind, a capital where the buildings are festooned with his name, drenched in glitz, and bristling with weapons.
As is often the case with Trump’s more unhinged posts, it is necessary to read his actual words to get a sense of how alarmingly strange they are:
At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.
Trump goes on to complain that Washington is the only capital city that does not have a “triumphal arch,” and vows that it will now have “the greatest of them all!”
Trump’s pivot from a memorial to a gilded turret is at least in part a legal strategy. When Trump’s ballroom plans faced legal challenges, the president went to the Supreme Court and argued that he had the right to continue with its construction because the bunker beneath it was a matter of national security. (Other presidents have on occasion tried to circumvent checks on their power by invoking national security, but Trump has made it a routine ploy.) The Court agreed, and Trump may now be trying to squash opposition to the arch on the same grounds.
This militarization of Washington ballrooms and memorials, however, is more than politics. Trump’s imaginings of castle-like defenses on the Potomac move beyond mere bad taste to a place of genuine weirdness. He does not merely imagine the new ballroom, for example, as the cap over a new, more secure presidential bunker; he imagines a space meant for parties and celebrations as a fort where he and his guests can celebrate beneath a drone port crewed by military and security personnel, including snipers.
The ballroom, however, almost seems like a rational investment compared to the arch Trump wants to build in front of America’s most hallowed ground. The entrance to the resting place of thousands of the nation’s war dead would be a “top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch”—whatever that means. (Perhaps it should include a portcullis and a drawbridge.) It would also be a permanent storage facility for a lot of ammunition.
What could go wrong? A space open to the public would also be a continuously operating military installation. Just imagine the sense of peace visitors, tourists, and schoolchildren would feel standing atop an ammo dump full of ordnance. But at least it might stop Chinese paratroopers or Al-Qaeda frogmen from seizing Washington with a daring raid after they’d subdued suburban Virginia.
None of this makes sense as a matter of national security. Yes, the White House is one of the most important centers of command and control in the United States, but it already has an array of defenses—including snipers on the roof when the Secret Service determines they might be needed. Other memorials and tourist attractions in D.C. are likewise guarded by layers of security and law enforcement. Trump, however, is imagining permanent military installations, including one on the roof of a White House annex, all because the current president apparently wants his successors to wake up every morning, see a ginormous eyesore, and remember that Donald Trump once lived there.
Militarizing an arch in front of the Memorial Bridge is an even more dangerous and stupid idea than turning a ballroom into a bastion. Motorists crossing the river would have to drive around the structure, potentially creating the kind of traffic jams terrorists could more easily exploit in a city already full of choke-points. (I lived in Arlington and commuted to the District; it’s a messy trip even now.) The arch would also stand close to the approaches to Reagan National Airport, as if that overburdened facility needed more safety and security challenges. And stuffing the arch with weapons would not only contradict the notion of honoring those who have died in battle, it would increase the possibility of a mistake or a malfunction.
The most important reason not to build the arch, of course, is that it is ugly and un-American. It is fascistic bombast, a militaristic yawp in front of a cemetery that is meant to be a place of respect and rest for the dead and quiet reflection for the living. It will loom over the cemetery, insisting that instead of thinking of the honored dead Americans think only of Donald Trump.
The president has never understood why Washington does not look like other capitals. America does not have a “triumphal arch” because Americans are not the kind of people who generally build such things. They do not ask their fellow citizens to swan about in uniform to celebrate foreign conquests. Napoleon broke ground for the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in 1806 to welcome his troops home after their victory at the battle of Austerlitz. It would take another 30 years to complete it, by which time Napoleon had long since returned in defeat from Moscow and then died in exile.
Speaking of Moscow, most of the institutions of the Russian government are surrounded by walls and parapets. The word “Kremlin” comes from the Russian word for “fortress,” and while it is imposing and even beautiful in its way, it is a symbol of centuries of autocracy and paranoia. And yet Trump wants to turn the White House and an outpost on the Potomac into similar citadels, with little regard for why America’s capital city was named for one of its greatest examples of unadorned republican virtue.
Trump clearly cares nothing for such symbolism. His ego wants what it wants. He lives in a city that he evidently hates and which, for the most part, hates him back. But Trump’s obsession with these vulgar memorials to his own vanity is a reminder of the darkness around him, of his hostility to democracy, his loathing of honor, and his disordered mind.
Perhaps the president is looking ahead to the day he is no longer the most powerful man in the world, and it pains him to think that he would be reviled—or worse, forgotten. If so, he seems determined to leave his mark on America’s capital even if it requires scarring it with militarized obscenities.
The post Trump’s Monumental Obsession appeared first on The Atlantic.
