President Donald Trump announced the idea of building a triumphal arch, modeled on Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, at a holiday party last December. At the time, he said that planning and construction of the proposed arch should be domestic policy chief Vince Haley’s “primary thing.”
The project’s architect, Nicolas Leo Charbonneau, a principal at the firm Harrison Design and leader of its “Sacred Architecture Studio,” told the New York Times that “the intent of the arch is a celebration in America of 250 years of greatness, freedom, and posterity, for which we can only thank the wisdom of our founders and God’s providence.”
The proposal was met with almost immediate pushback from the general public, as well as by military veterans (the 250-foot-tall arch would be cited on Memorial Circle in Arlington, Va., across the channel from Arlington National Cemetery) and historic preservationists. The deputy general counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation testified that the Trust is “extremely concerned about the location, the height, the scale, and the design of the proposed arch,” according to the Times. “Arlington National Cemetery is a living memorial that hosts hundreds of funeral services every month,” the deputy council, Elizabeth Merritt, said. “The arch, as proposed, would dominate the national cemetery.”
Despite these objections, the Commission of Fine Arts approved the plan, which includes golden eagles and a winged angel adorning the arch—decorative features that the panel had initially suggested removing in order to make the monument somewhat smaller.
All seven members of the Commission of Fine Arts were appointed by Trump between Jan. 8 and Jan. 27, 2026. The previous group of commissioners, which had been appointed by former President Joe Biden, was fired en masse in October 2025, ahead of a review of another one of Trump’s controversial construction projects, the White House ballroom.
