The architecture critic who encouraged Donald Trump to build a huge triumphal arch in Washington, D.C., has abandoned the idea.
The Commission of Fine Arts is filled with Trump appointees and is due to meet on Thursday to discuss the president’s plans to build a 250-foot-tall arch in the capital, already nicknamed the Arc de Trump.
Catesby Leigh was the first to explore the idea of a modest “celebratory” structure, but since the idea reached Trump, its size has grown fourfold, amid feeble gropes for historical significance and one-sided competitiveness with France’s Arc de Triomphe.
First, it grew from Leigh’s initial proposal of 60 feet to 76 feet to mark the founding year of the U.S., 1776. Trump is now happy with the idea of a 250-foot structure to celebrate 250 years of America, complete with gold trim, lions, eagles, and the words “One Nation Under God.” It would be 86 feet taller than Paris’ monument.
The current plan, rendered by Harrison Design and complete with a gold Lady Liberty, is for the arch to stand across the Potomac River from the 99-foot-high Lincoln Memorial at Memorial Circle, near Arlington National Cemetery. Veterans have already raised concerns about it overshadowing the graves of war dead, with one group even suing.
Now Leigh too fears that Trump’s vision has grown to such an extent that it is no longer a good idea.
“It’s way too big for that site,” he told The New York Times.
“I was proposing a celebratory project,” he said. “An arch of not titanic dimensions; an arch that could be built by July 4, 2026. And if the arch were considered to be of enduring value in its design, then it could be rebuilt in permanent form.”
In his initial proposal last year, Leigh wrote in The American Mind, a magazine attached to right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, that “Washington is the only major Western capital without a monumental arch.”
The Times reports that at this stage, Trump had not yet encountered the idea, and Leigh felt sure that if one were built, it would not need to be “huge” and certainly no taller than 60 feet.
By December, Trump was pushing for bigger, saying, “The one that people know mostly is the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France, and we’re going to top it by, I think, a lot… The only thing they have is history.”
The Arc de Triomphe, a legacy of the imperial conquests of French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, stands at 164 feet tall.
Many of the great Western triumphal arches that Trump has ogled longingly were built some time ago, often in centuries defined by European imperialism.
The Arc de Triomphe was built in 1806, initially to celebrate Napoleon’s successes on the battlefield, while London’s Wellington Arch was finished in 1830 to mark Britain’s own victories in the Napoleonic wars. More than a millennium prior, the Arch of Constantine in Rome, Italy, was built in 315 to mark Emperor Constantine’s victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge three years earlier.
Other arches were built in the name of progress, such as the 1888 Arc de Triomf in Barcelona, Spain, which was commissioned as a symbol of Catalan advancement and served as an entrance to the Barcelona World’s Fair.
Meanwhile, Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate was finished in 1788 by the Prussians as a symbol of peace, a legacy that has endured world wars and later stood as a symbol of hope in the restricted zone between East and West during the Cold War.
In October, when CBS asked Trump what his arch would commemorate, he pointed at himself and said, “me.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
