Trump’s arch is blocked for now, but a glitzy new website highlights the plans

WASHINGTON — A federal court has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump from breaking ground for his towering memorial arch, but that hasn’t stopped his administration from pushing forward with the plans for building it, starting with a glitzy new website launched Friday.

The site’s debut is yet another sign of how much Trump is leaning into his efforts to make over the White House and Washington to his own gilded tastes, even after his party lost control of Congress in a midterm-election drubbing. It was the fourth day this week alone that the administration promoted his projects.

The website declares that the 250-foot-tall structure — which is slated to rise in a mass of blindingly gold ornamentation and stately gray granite between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery — will be formally known as the United States Military Triumphal Arch.

Describing the arch as “an American vision finally realized,” the site offers bird’s-eye views of the proposal from many angles and shows off the declarations it will feature: “One Nation Under God” on one side and “Golden Age of America” on another. It’s also set to have towering gold doors complete with panels of sculptures at its base.

At its very top, the structure features a golden-hued cherub hoisting a flaming torch that recalls a smaller version of the Statue of Liberty.

The website does not say how much the project will cost or how it will be paid for, although some estimates have reached as high as $100 million.

The White House highlighted the website the morning after U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a temporary restraining order that prohibits work on the site for 14 days. That order followed a vote to approve the arch by a federal planning commission that is stocked with Trump’s allies.

With Democrats taking control of Congress in January, Trump’s renovation projects will encounter far more scrutiny and roadblocks — from his effort to put his own name on the Kennedy Center to remaking a public golf course and building his massive White House ballroom and the arch.

Rep. Jared Huffman of California, the top Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee with jurisdiction over the Interior Department that is involved with operations at parks and federal lands, spent much of the past year probing and questioning Trump’s projects, laying the groundwork for this moment.

“We’ve pushed back against vanity projects that seek to transform treasured public spaces into gaudy tributes to Trump. We exposed corruption, uncovered the efforts to hijack America’s 250th birthday, demanded accountability, and offered a compelling alternative governing vision grounded in science, fairness, environmental responsibility, and the rule of law,” Huffman said in a letter to colleagues seeking their support to be chairperson.

As chairperson with a strong Democratic majority, “I will ensure that the Committee’s full investigative and oversight authority is leveraged to uncover wrongdoing, demand accountability, and protect the public interest,” he said.

Trump has been rushing the various projects, a point Virginia Democratic Rep. Don Beyer made Thursday at a public hearing when he opposed construction of the memorial arch.

“The appropriations process beginning Jan. 3 will be controlled by Democrats. That will be one of the ways Congressman Beyer will step in,” said Beyer’s spokesperson Aaron Fritschner.

A less appreciated impact will be the change in who names the general counsel of the House. The House Speaker has that role, presumably Rep. Hakeem Jeffries.

While Democrats have joined in lawsuits opposing the various projects, their filings don’t carry the weight of Congress as the minority. “You’ll see the new majority pulling back the balance of power that (House Speaker) Mike Johnson was willing to cede,” Fritschner said.

The president on Monday focused his final remarks before the midterm elections talking up his costly and problem-plagued effort to overhaul the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool. The day after the losses, on Wednesday, he took reporters on a tour of the ballroom’s construction site. And his first official action after his party lost control of Congress was to declare, on Thursday, that the Oval Office would become a national monument.

The arch website features the word “Triumph” in gold cursive script recalling the typeface used at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and similar flourishes that have been affixed to the White House as part of his overhaul of the Oval Office and West Wing.

The arch plans feature an event space in the horizontal part of the structure reached by elevators and stairs.

But inside its “massive columns will be storage for munitions,” the site states, as well as areas on the pedestal and observation deck that will be “set aside for snipers, countersnipers, and provisions for a sniper nest.”

An open ground area at the monument’s base “will be designed for launching drones and other homeland security assets,” the site says, while also noting that the arch “will be Highly Secretive but, at the same time, a Top Level and Lethal structure, the likes of which has not been seen in this Country before.”

“It is long overdue, and has been sought for many years, especially by the Military,” it says.

Trump has said for months that the monument would be inspired by the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and that Washington has wanted a similar structure for centuries — even though that’s not true. He previously joked that it might be called the “Arc de Trump.”

The website repeats Trump’s inaccurate claims. It also features a picture of the president and quotes him as saying, “This will be the greatest and most beautiful triumphal arch, anywhere in the world.”