President Donald Trump sparked controversy overnight by teasing a new monument in a wordless social media post, adding to scrutiny over his lavish White House renovations.
Without further explanation, Trump posted design firm Harrison Design’s rendering of the arch after midnight on Saturday morning.
News of the 79-year-old president’s proposed arch emerged this week after reporters captured 3D models of the Harrison Design plan during an Oval Office meeting with Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb.
The arch is planned for Memorial Circle, across the Arlington Memorial Bridge from the Lincoln Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary in 2026.
Critics, including architect Eric Jenkins, warn the arch stands to “disrupt a symbolic connection” between “the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington House and Arlington National Cemetery’s ‘most hallowed ground.’”
The former University of Maryland and Catholic University educator, who has taught studios in Rome, Jenkins, experienced in Greco-Roman architectural studies, called “contemporary classical architecture” a clear oxymoron.
“Connection is the key—linking, bridging, reconciling. That’s what the Memorial Bridge does. It unites Lincoln’s legacy with Arlington, once home to Robert E. Lee, now a site of national mourning. The arch would more than likely obscure John F. Kennedy’s eternal flame that can be seen from the Lincoln Memorial on dark nights,” Jenkins told The Architect’s Newspaper.
“Inserting a grand, false monument into that axis and space breaks that symbolism. It risks replacing subtlety with spectacle, solemnity with show. Instead of healing, it imposes,” he added.
The model, shown with the Lincoln Memorial facing the wrong way, also drew a range of social media comparisons, some of which went to the extreme of likening the designs to those of Albert Speer, the Nazi-era architect known for designing grand structures in Germany, including an unbuilt arch.
The proposed design, inspired by Brooklyn’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch and Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, would feature a gold-winged angel and two white eagles at Memorial Circle across from the Lincoln Memorial.
The proposed arch is controversial but not unprecedented. Early 20th-century plans for D.C., including the 1901 McMillan Plan, envisioned a Paris-style triumphal arch, though it was never built, the newspaper reports.
In 2000, the National Monuments Foundation proposed the Millennium Gate at Barney Circle, but concerns over traffic and the aftermath of 9/11 shelved the project, art critic Catesby Leigh, a longtime supporter of the arch, wrote in an April op-ed.
Jenkins argues that Memorial Circle is similarly unsuitable due to heavy traffic, making a monumental arch both inaccessible and out of place.
Meanwhile, Leigh, who first proposed building an arch, has advocated for it to fill the “conspicuous dead space” at Memorial Circle between Arlington Memorial Bridge and Arlington National Cemetery.
“Washington is the only major Western capital without a monumental arch,” Leigh wrote in April.
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has made extensive renovations, including adding gold accents and new flags in the Oval Office, transforming the Rose Garden with stone paving and resort-style furniture, and beginning construction of a $200 million, 90,000-square-foot East Wing ballroom with Gilded Age–inspired details.
