‘We’re Doing It’ Trump Pushes Past Lawsuits and Red Tape to Break Ground on National Arch

For decades, critics of Washington’s building culture have made the same complaint: nothing bold gets built in the capital without years of environmental review, commission hearings, and lawsuits from groups determined to keep things exactly as they are. President Trump’s answer to that complaint is now rising, quite literally, on the banks of the Potomac.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced this week that site excavation will begin within the next two weeks on a 250-foot triumphal arch at Memorial Circle, the traffic roundabout at the Virginia end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, directly across the river from the Lincoln Memorial. Clad in granite and topped with three gilded statues and an observation deck, the structure — informally dubbed the “Arc de Trump” by both admirers and critics — is intended to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence. Construction is expected to run around the clock, two to three years, wrapping up near the end of Trump’s second term.

Trump has been blunt about who the monument is for and who gets to stop it. Asked last year who it honors, he pointed to himself: “Me.” And when reporters pressed him on the legal fight still working through federal court, his answer was equally direct: the land belongs to the Interior Department, and in his view, Congress doesn’t get a veto. “No, no, we’re doing it,” he said.

A Century-Old Blueprint, and a Modern Fight

The administration’s argument isn’t built from nothing. More than a century ago, Congress authorized a pair of 166-foot columns for roughly that same site — a plan that was never carried out. Supporters see the arch, at nearly one and a half times that original height, as finally finishing a promise Washington made to itself and never kept. To backers of the project, that’s the whole point: a capital that talks endlessly about honoring its history while leaving its most ambitious architectural ideas to gather dust in a filing cabinet.

The opposition is real, though, and it isn’t limited to aesthetics. A group of Vietnam War veterans and an architectural historian sued in February to block the project, arguing the Commemorative Works Act requires congressional authorization before a monument of this scale can go up on federal land, and that a 250-foot structure — more than double the height of the Lincoln Memorial — would break the sightline between Arlington National Cemetery and the Mall. A federal judge declined to block construction with a preliminary injunction, but the underlying lawsuit is still working its way through court even as excavation begins. The National Park Service’s own environmental report backed the project while acknowledging it would have “adverse effects” on the historic character of the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and other nearby landmarks. Democratic lawmakers, including Virginia Rep. Don Beyer, whose district borders the site, have called the timeline reckless, accusing the administration of rushing ahead of the courts for political reasons.

Why Supporters Say It’s Worth the Fight

None of that has slowed the White House down, and for supporters of the project, that’s exactly the point. Washington, they note, is the only major Western capital without a monumental arch of its own — a gap architecture critics have pointed to for years as a symbol of a country that’s lost the confidence to build anything that doesn’t first survive a decade of committee review. An estimated $100 million structure, using an existing federal contract rather than a new public bid, is being framed by the administration as proof that big, visible projects don’t have to be slow-walked into irrelevance by process for process’s sake.

There’s a fair rebuttal on the other side worth holding in view: using an existing contract to bypass standard bidding and site-survey procedures, and building before an active lawsuit is resolved, is precisely the kind of shortcut that normally draws scrutiny from good-government watchdogs regardless of who occupies the White House. Critics aren’t wrong that a structure twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial is a genuinely unusual addition to that sightline, and the courts, not the campaign trail, will ultimately decide whether the legal shortcuts hold up.

But for an administration that has staked its identity on visible, physical results — that America should look like a country that still builds things, not just debates them — breaking ground before the lawsuit even resolves is itself the message. Whether it becomes a lasting symbol of national ambition or a costly legal mess will likely take years, and a few more court dates, to sort out. For now, the concrete trucks are the ones making the argument.