Rising This Week: Obscuring Arlington
This Memorial Day, Donald Trump is telling vets that a monument to his ego matters more than their final resting place.
The problem with Donald Trump’s early morning post this Memorial Day began with the first word.
Then, it somehow got worse.
“Happy Memorial Day to all, including the Dumocrats, who disrespect our Military and all of the tremendous success that it has had over the last year,” Trump wrote on social media.
The word to describe a federal holiday in solemn remembrance of the wartime dead isn’t “happy,” no matter how associated the day has become in the popular imagination with barbecues and beaches. Beginning with its post-Civil War era roots, the holiday has been about commemorating fallen soldiers, originally by adorning their graves with flowers and wreaths under an earlier tradition known as “Decoration Day.” Congress formally changed the name to Memorial Day in 1971, but its somber focus remained the same, before Trump turned it into more partisan grist.
Trump, who avoided military service in Vietnam, paid lip service to those who “made the ultimate sacrifice,” a group of people he once described as “losers” and “suckers.” The Atlantic reported that Trump made those comments at a different military cemetery near Paris: the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in 2018. Trump denied the report at the time, only to be contradicted by his own former Chief of Staff John Kelly, who confirmed hearing his former boss making those comments.
This year, Trump made similar comments openly during his speech, calling the Presidential Medal of Freedom “much better” than the Congressional Medal of Honor — because the Medal of Honor recipients are in “very bad shape” or “dead.” Just as he did during his criminal trial, Trump appeared to fall asleep during the ceremony for the fallen. His eyes were closed during Pete Hegseth’s speech about the first Decoration Day mourners.
Trump is sending veterans a similar message through the symbolism of trying to obscure the view of Arlington National Cemetery with a monument to his ego.
On Thursday, three Trump-appointed commissioners from the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts approved the design for a 250-foot “Triumphal Arch,” which would be positioned between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The Arch would obscure the views of both landmarks but, as historian Heather Cox Richardson notes, “perfectly” frame Arlington House, a mansion once owned by Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
“The arch does not frame the nation’s honored dead, but frames instead the home of the man who led the armies of the Confederacy that killed them,” she noted.
A gaudy and gilded nod to Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, the monument has taken on an unofficial nickname that hits closer to the mark: It’s a proposed “Arc de Trump,” but it’s not a fait accompli. No sooner had the design plans been confirmed by Trump’s handpicked commissioners than a federal judge cast the plan into doubt.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who presided over Trump’s election subversion criminal case, has been presiding over a lawsuit filed by three veterans and an architectural historian seeking to block the plan from moving forward. On Thursday, Chutkan sharply questioned Trump’s authority to build the arch, pointing out that Congress must approve any major new structure on federally administered land in Washington, D.C.
The vets and historian who filed the complaint deserve recognition:
Michael Lemmon, the lead plaintiff, is a U.S. Army and Vietnam War veteran and former U.S. Ambassador to Armenia.
U.S. Navy and Vietnam war veteran Shaun Byrnes served as a Senior Foreign Service Officer and Chief of the U.S. Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission during the Kosovo War.
U.S. Army and Vietnam War veteran Jon Gundersen served as the Chargé d’Affaires ad interim United States to Ukraine, Estonia, Iceland, and Norway.
In their complaint, all three veterans state that they regularly visit the cemetery to “honor the service” of their “many comrades-in-arms who are buried there.”
According to the lawsuit, Lemmon “hopes to be interred” there.
The fourth plaintiff, Calder Loth, is the now-retired Senior Architectural Historian for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, who has “aesthetic and professional interests in the preservation and protection of historic and cultural resources in Virginia and Washington, D.C.” The four of them are represented by the watchdog group Public Citizen, whose lawsuit notes that Trump’s arch would more than double the height of the Lincoln Memorial.
There’s something symbolically fitting, if appalling, about Trump’s attempt to cast the nation’s most iconic military cemetery in the proverbial shadow of his Arc de Trump.
Trump’s second term has shown him to be flippant and unleashed about committing U.S. soldiers to foreign regime change.
With 13 U.S. service members dead in the Iran War, Trump responded to criticism that he was surrendering to the Islamic Republic’s maximalist demands with social media sabre rattling, posting an image of a bomb marked with his tagline: “THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!”
Trump and his surrogates have strongly suggested that Cuba is next.
At every turn, Trump has responded to the life-or-death gravity of his decisions with self-aggrandizement and online trolling.
These provocations have sparked opposition in the form of lawsuits and civic engagement. Over the long weekend, activists staged a three-day series of protests, marches, and vigils organized by the group Third Act DMV.
Their name for the protest? “86 the Arch.”
All Rise News will continue to follow and report on opposition to Trump’s arch in the courts and on the streets.
This week’s preview of court listings is below, including the case infamously premised on an off-dictionary definition of “86.”
