Arc de Trump
Is the White House building a triumphal arch outside Arlington National Cemetery?
By Daniel Jonas Roche • October 10, 2025
In Washington, D.C. a new triumphal arch may be built across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, to commemorate the country’s 250th anniversary. The proposal by architecture firm Harrison Design appears to be the same height—if not taller than—the Lincoln Memorial, which it would face.
News of the arch circulated yesterday after Jim Watson photographed 3D-printed scale models of Harrison Design’s proposal at a meeting in the Oval Office between President Trump and Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb. Reporting in The Washington Post said Justin Shubow, president of the National Civic Art Society, presented the idea to Trump earlier this year.
Watson’s photograph showed the Lincoln Memorial facing the wrong direction, and the model quickly garnered comparisons to Albert Speer’s unbuilt German Arch of Triumph.
The proposed arch echoes that of Grand Army Plaza Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch in Brooklyn, and of course Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. It would have a gold winged angel and two white eagles. Its tentative site is Memorial Circle—a traffic roundabout across the Arlington Memorial Bridge from the Lincoln Memorial.
Eric Jenkins, an architect and former educator at the University of Maryland and Catholic University, said the arch stands to “disrupt a symbolic connection” between “the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington House and Arlington National Cemetery’s ‘most hallowed ground.’”
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https://www.archpaper.com/2025/10/trump-triumphal-arch-arlington-national-cemetery/
