Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. You can subscribe to her free Substack, The Haake Take.
Veterans are standing in the middle of D.C.’s Memorial Circle at rush hour with banners denouncing plans for Trump’s arch. Their continuing protest, which started on Memorial Day, features a replica arch and an urgent plea to “protect and defend the solemnity and honor of this hallowed ground.”
The veterans have a point the rest of us need to hear, including 'unitary executive’ nonsense-spouting Supreme Court justices who think the madman at the helm is free to take a wrecking ball to our nation’s historical monuments. At 25 stories tall, Trump’s arch would deliberately diminish the stature of monuments around it, and would forever obscure historical sightlines, laid after the Civil War to symbolize national healing.
At the protests, Retired Army Colonel Ann Wright, a 29-year Special Operations officer, carries an “over our dead bodies” banner for “Mr. Bonespurs, with five deferments from the military.” The veterans’ spokesperson explained that, “To place a memorial that would obstruct the unbroken viewshed from the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington Cemetery would totally destroy all that this space represents.”
Trump’s sacrilege
The targeted sightline, unbroken across the Potomac River via the Arlington Memorial Bridge, was rendered two generations after the Civil War as a symbol of national reconciliation. The memorial to Abraham Lincoln, preserver of the Union, deliberately overlooks Arlington, the estate of Confederate Robert E. Lee and the hallowed burial grounds for both sides, to symbolize the enduring triumph of national unity over the tragedy of division.
Alignment of those monuments was key. Lincoln’s memorial (‘A house divided against itself cannot stand’) solemnly overlooks the shared blood and soil of Arlington’s dead. Veterans are concerned that a giant arch dominating Arlington, now the final resting place of more than 400,000 war veterans, many of whom died in battle, would overpower the significance of their sacrifice.
Retired Army Major General Paul Eaton called the arch “entirely inappropriate, (bordering) on sacrilege to the men and women buried” there. A Gold Star mother whose son is buried at Arlington lamented grievously that the arch’s planned observation deck means tourists will be able to take selfies while burials are happening.
“We don’t need tourists overlooking funerals. I’m just appalled,” she said. “We need everybody to speak out about this.”
The legal battle
In May, a federal panel packed with Trump appointees approved plans for the arch, then in August, the National Park Service found the monument would have “adverse effects” on several historic sites. Although aviation experts noted the hazards of a 250-foot arch near the runway of one of the nation’s busiest airports, last week Trump’s FAA approved the plans.
Meanwhile, Vietnam War veterans have sued to stop the project, challenging the arch for both lacking congressional authority and blocking historically significant monument sightlines. Earlier this month, a federal judge ordered the administration to provide at least 48 hours’ notice before conducting any activities on the planned arch while the case is pending.
After that order, over a year after revealing plans for the arch, and after the Supreme Court let Trump get away with his ballroom on manufactured national security grounds, Trump then raised a national security rationale for the arch. Last Sunday, Trump claimed that he’d “agreed” to convert the proposed arch, at the “strong request” of the military, “into a top grade Military Complex/ Triumphal Arch,” alleging that:
"(F)or National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, (laughably false)… into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch…”
Trump said his arch would “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.” Arlington’s historic message of national healing — and the devastation of its opposite — is sadly lost on the most divisive president in our nation’s history. He also seems to miss how a Hitler-inspired monument would discourage tourists who may not want snipers aimed at their heads.
Ye old national security ruse
Courts have long given deference to the executive on matters of national security. In 1936, the Supreme Court said presidents must have ‘wide latitude in security affairs,’ reiterating the same in 1988, and again in 2018. Small wonder Trump is now claiming that his decorative arch is “necessary to protect US national security.”
Never mind that it took Trump over a year to manufacture a “national security” rationale for his obviously ornamental arch.
Trump’s security claim is just another well-worn litigation ruse. He also cited national security to defend both unconstitutional immigration tactics and his ban of several media outlets from the White House. He even claimed that trade relations posed an “unusual and extraordinary threat to national security” to defend his tariffs, an argument the Supreme Court rejected.
The ballroom decision illustrates the flaw of the “unitary executive” theory
After the Supreme Court cleared the way for Trump’s sprawling ballroom, however, the same flawed analysis could protect Trump’s arch. Even after Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Trump’s ballroom was “likely unlawful,” the other conservative justices determined that the National Trust for Historic Preservation couldn’t block it, because “mere offense, disagreement, or distaste” wasn’t enough to constitute an injury for purposes of standing, trashing decades of legal precedent whereby historic preservationists successfully sued to protect historic landmarks.
The question now dangling before a nation dreading a Hitlerian arch in D.C. is this: If a National Trust created by Congress to act as guardians of historic monuments doesn’t have standing to sue to protect those monuments, who the hell does?
If SCOTUS approves this arch, under its misguided ‘unitary executive’ theory that contradicts the founders’ intentions of never having a king again, wait for Trump to sandblast his name into all four sides of the Washington Monument, install a statue of himself sitting in the Lincoln Memorial, and carve his own face on Mount Rushmore.
The only silver lining of such a ruling would be that the next president would then possess the legal authority to build another monument on the basis of national security: a permanent prison cell around Trump, open for public viewing at feeding times. Only then, the security justification will be real.