The New York Times is sounding the alarm over President Donald Trump’s plans to remake the nation’s capital, warning his vision will be “felt across the country for generations.”
On Sunday, Trump’s hometown paper delivered a brutal verdict on his Washington, D.C., makeover, with Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger, 75, taking aim at the president’s growing list of capital projects.
Goldberger started with what he called the “travesty” of the proposed “Arc de Trump”—a gilded monument modeled on France’s Arc de Triomphe that the president is rushing to build at Memorial Circle before his term ends in 2029.
The vanity project is expected to cost nine figures and soar 250 feet into the sky, dwarfing the 99-foot Lincoln Memorial across the Potomac River and, as Goldberger warns, potentially “dramatically” changing the landscape of the nation’s capital.
“It would be an unavoidable monument to a presidency and a man whom many Americans would rather not honor so conspicuously, if at all,” Goldberger writes, arguing that Trump, 80, is rushing to get the Arc built because he understands just how much it would come to dominate the city.
A National Park Service review under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act identified nearly 40 landmarks in and around the nation’s capital that the Arc could obscure.
But Goldberger warned that the very provision designed to protect historic sites and buildings is now being eroded by the Trump administration, which is seeking to revise the 60-year-old preservation tool in ways that could make it easier to build the president’s projects—what the critic called a potential “wrecking ball” to the historic preservation movement in the country.
“If the changes go forward, the wanton destructiveness behind the arch and the East Wing ballroom will be just the beginning,” Goldberger warned, bringing another of Trump’s flagship projects into the picture: a planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom on the site where he demolished the White House’s East Wing.
The $400 million project hit a major roadblock Friday when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ordered construction to stop. Trump now has 14 days to appeal to the Supreme Court if he wants to keep the ballroom project moving.
Still, Goldberger noted that under the proposed changes to Section 106, “the bar for defining the negative impact of a project is raised much higher,” meaning many of Trump’s vanity projects could face far less pushback from preservation officials.
The critic also took aim at several of Trump’s other Washington projects, including the “wreck” that is the Reflecting Pool, which was supposed to be transformed into an American-flag blue but instead became a mess of algae and peeling paint. He also mocked the president’s “cheap” plan to paint the Eisenhower Executive Office Building white to match the White House.
While the failed Reflecting Pool renovation cost $16 million, the plan to paint the historic 19th-century building white is expected to cost at least $7.5 million and, Goldberger warned, could leave it “effectively ruined.”
According to White House correspondent and Regime Change co-author Maggie Haberman, “seventy percent” of the president’s mind share is focused on renovations.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
