Donald Trump’s chair of the Commission of Fine Arts wants the president to dramatically expand his plans to build tacky monuments to himself across the nation’s capital.
“I think the president should do three,” Rodney Mims Cook Jr. told the Washington Post of the White House’s existing plans to build a 250-foot “Arch de Trump”—modeled loosely on France’s Arc de Triomphe—near Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
Cook says he’s already picked out two other prospective locations in the southeast of the city, near the John Philip Sousa Bridge and the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, even though the commission has not yet approved plans for the first.
The panel convenes Thursday to review proposals for the monument, on which the White House is aiming to begin construction later this year to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Cook, already under fire for greenlighting Trump’s plans, now in action, to construct a colossal ballroom on the site where the East Wing of the White House once stood, did not confirm or deny whether he’d raised the possibility of the three arches with the president himself.
Trump’s arch plans have drawn fierce opposition. A group of Vietnam War veterans—a conflict for which the president dodged the draft on five occasions—filed to block construction earlier in February because they say the monument threatens to disrupt historic sightlines of the nearby military cemetery.
The veterans argued in their complaint that “by obstructing the symbolic and inspiring view from Arlington National Cemetery to the Lincoln Memorial,” the planned arch “would dishonor their military and foreign service and the legacy of their comrades and other veterans buried” at the site. The complaint notes it also “would degrade their personal experience when visiting.”
Cook’s panel itself is also under scrutiny. Trump dismissed all six previous commissioners last year and replaced them with appointees perceived to be more aligned with his administration, in a move that recalls his controversial MAGA restructuring of the Kennedy Center—or, as it is now known, The Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
