President Donald Trump holds a model of his proposed arch during a ballroom fundraising dinner in the White House on October 15, 2025.Kevin Dietsch/Getty
President Donald Trump said that he plans to make his proposed 250-foot arch in Washington, DC, a “top grade military complex” that holds large stores of weaponry, citing national security reasons and a “strong request” from the US military.
Trump added in his Sunday post on Truth Social that the planned “Triumphal Arch” near the National Mall would “have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas.”
The president first proposed building the arch last October to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary. The much-criticized project, as currently planned, would tower over most other DC landmarks—the tallest being the Washington Monument, at approximately 555 feet—and block the view of Arlington National Cemetery from the Lincoln Memorial.
Three Vietnam War veterans sued the administration to prevent construction of the arch based on the view issue, and also because Trump has not secured the required approval from Congress. Earlier this month, a federal judge ordered the administration to provide 48 hours’ notice before doing any work on the project, but has yet to rule on the merits of the case.
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) called Trump’s new arch plan, “obviously idiotic” as he “clearly expects to lose a lawsuit and therefore wants to set up a pretext to argue that the arch is tied to national security.”
Trump’s latest post represents a significant departure from his former plan for the arch, which included a winged, gilded statue of Lady Liberty and an inscription reading, “One Nation Under God.” The drones and snipers could indeed be a matter of Trump trying to justify the arch as a national security requirement—he applied a similar argument to his unpermitted and unpopular White House ballroom, announcing in March that “the military is building a big complex under the ballroom.”
As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz has pointed out, Trump has a long history of using the idea of “national security” to do whatever he wants: threatening to annex Greenland, targeting ICE protesters as terrorists, expanding construction of hyperscale data centers, and removing trans people from public life. “If national security is everything, then national security is nothing at all,” Hurwitz noted. Well, except, in this case, an excuse for Trump to abuse his power when no one is willing to stop him.
