Faulty reasoning signals

• Biased Writer Voice - 24.3%
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• Appeal to Emotion - 8.5%

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Speaking at Yale in 1962, John F. Kennedy said, “For the greatest enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.” President Donald Trump is the master of the myth. Trump wants to build a towering “ Triumphal Arch ” at Memorial Circle in Washington near the Lincoln Memorial and across the Potomac River from Arlington National Cemetery. He has quadrupled the size of the arch from his original proposal. It is known as the “Arc de Trump” since, when asked whom the arch would honor, he said, “ Me .” Trump has argued that his plan fulfills a century-old congressional vision for the site. Not so, Trump has distorted and overreached what Congress did in 1925, just as he overreached what Congress did in 1977 when he issued his executive order imposing draconian tariffs around the world. As Chief Justice John Roberts stressed in the tariff case, “a reasonable interpreter would [not] expect” Congress to “pawn” such a “big-time policy call… off to another branch.” The century-old discussions and plans for the circle “are now being used as some sort of justification for the monumental arch… But historic renderings and descriptions show clearly how materially different they are,” said Priya Jain, who chairs the historical preservation committee at the Society of Architectural Historians, last month at a meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission. Two eagles and a winged angel are perched atop the arch, with the phrases “One Nation Under God” and “Liberty and Justice For All” sitting above. After Trump unveiled his plan in April 2025, the renowned architecture critic Paul Goldberger described the 250-foot “Triumphal Arch” as a monument to excess rather than true classical dignity. The Circle is a traffic island, and it has never been built on, since it is right in the middle of the sight line connecting the Lincoln Memorial with Arlington National Cemetery, established in 1864 on land taken from Robert E. Lee and used to bury the Union war dead. There is an important metaphorical connection between the Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial that the arch would block in both directions. Sacrilege? Neither Trump nor his MAGA base seems to like what the Lincoln Memorial represents. Too much: Marian Anderson singing and Martin Luther King dreaming in a way they fear might come true. That’s why, as Goldberger points out, “he is now desecrating …the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in bright blue. It will end up looking more like a hotel swimming pool than an element in a serene and monumental civic composition.” In his critique, published in Air Mail , Goldberger noted that “Trump’s idea of classicism is not dignity and order but over-the-top gaudiness and excess—not Jeffersonian decorum but super-sized Las Vegas vulgarity. Trump does not join movements; he hijacks them and remakes them in his own image.” The plan is so bizarre that Catesby Leigh, an art and architecture critic, and a co-founder of the National Civic Art Society, America’s foremost organization advocating for beautiful and inspiring monuments, memorials, and public architecture, which has been pushing for more traditional architecture in the nation’s capital, has reportedly now disassociated himself from the project, suggesting that it is no longer to his liking. I myself, writing in these pages , looked at the plans and was horrified, calling the arch “a monstrosity in the making” and an “excrescence on the landscape.” “People pass that circle, they say, ‘Why isn’t something built here?” Trump said in the Oval Office in May. What people? Can you imagine some Trump toady in the Situation Room remarking, amid plans to bomb, saying to the King, “I just passed the circle; why isn’t something built here?” Lawmakers and local leaders spent decades in the 19th century debating what to build at the western end of the National Mall. A Senate commission in 1902 issued a report calling for a new bridge over the Potomac River—a proposal that would eventually become the Arlington Memorial Bridge. The plan Congress authorized in 1925 called for a new bridge spanning the Potomac River and a pair of columns at its western side, near where Memorial Circle is today. The bridge was built, but the columns never were. “This large space directly contradicts the original vision,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who is helping oversee the project, told a federal commission reviewing the proposed arch designs in April. An “original vision” is invariably unfilled space. But does the “original vision” comprehend an arch honoring Donald Trump? He wasn’t even born in 1925. Dictators, from Mussolini and Porfirio Díaz in Mexico to Adolf Hitler, have relished monuments honoring themselves. We don’t do that here, at least not until now. Isn’t it enough to be president and let future generations build the monuments? Trump’s captive Justice Department has also piled on, repeatedly arguing that Congress’s past support for columns gives it authority to build a structure. Can a restaurant plausibly claim that because I select a dish from Column A, they can serve me a dish from Column B because it appears in a column? “Neither the underlying Congressional authorization to build the columns—nor the discretion to modify column design—has expired,” Trump administration lawyers wrote in a crabbed court filing last month. Neither apparently has Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was fixed. The National Capital Planning Commission, a federal agency reviewing the project, is set to review and potentially approve the administration’s arch plans. The 166-foot-tall columns that Congress approved 100 years ago, which Trump and his deputies cite to press their case, are a far cry from the 250-foot-tall monument they plan to construct, which would more dramatically alter pedestrians’ views and reshape the historic skyline near the Lincoln Memorial. Trump cannot restrain himself from prevarication. When asked who was paying for upending the busy walkway in the West Colonnade, which connected the White House residence to the Oval Office, and replacing it with polished black African granite carved in Italy, he responded, “I am.” In fact, it is being funded out of money appropriated for guardrail protections in the National Parks. Trump doesn’t like guardrails anyway. The post Trump’s Flimsy Argument for his “Triumphal Arch” appeared first on Washington Monthly .