Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Kelly Summers, Assistant Professor of History, Department of Humanities, MacEwan University
Vietnam War veterans are suing to block construction of United States President Donald Trump’s proposed triumphal arch in Washington, D.C., arguing that it would detract from the solemnity of nearby Arlington Cemetery.
Having demolished the White House’s East Wing and shuttered the renamed Kennedy Center for “complete rebuilding,” Trump plans to install what he calls an Independence Arch to mark the country’s 250th anniversary this July.
Since Trump’s re-election, Catesby Leigh of the Claremont Institute — a California think tank at the forefront of the “MAGA new right” — has urged him to erect a classical arch to proclaim the “universal significance” of the Declaration of Independence.
Leigh insisted the “nation has had enough of sackcloth and ashes, whether in the form of wokedom’s historically illiterate memes or modernism’s esthetic anorexia.”
Trump embraced the idea. A patriotic landmark would complement his efforts to purge what he called “improper ideology” from Washington institutions like the Smithsonian museum and the National Zoo.
A grand monument would also serve one of the top priorities of the current government: gratifying the president’s ego. When asked who the arch is for, Trump was honest: “Me.”
But the project professes a nobler mission. Trump’s executive order to “make federal architecture beautiful again” praised the Founding Fathers’ use of neoclassicism to “visually connect” the American republic “with the antecedents of democracy” in ancient Athens and Rome.
As a historian who studies the French Republic’s slide into military dictatorship in the early 19th century, what troubles me about this rationale is that there is nothing inherently democratic about arches.
In fact, some of the most famous iterations in ancient Rome and Napoleonic France warn us of the tendency of republics to devolve into autocratic empires.
Recalling Rome
The U.S. founders wanted to avoid the pitfalls of imperial ostentation, militarism and personality cults as they planned their new capital.
An early test was how to commemorate the nation’s first president after his death in 1799.
A hero of the War of Independence, George Washington served two terms as president and set a key precedent by refusing to seek a third.
If he had a Roman forebear, it was the humble farmer Cincinnatus rather than Julius Caesar, whose insatiable ambition toppled the republic and laid the foundation for empire.
Read more:
Which Roman emperor was most like Donald Trump?
Early Americans were well-versed in the Roman republic’s rise, corruption and fall.
Under the Republic (509 BCE to 27 BCE), the Roman Senate rewarded victorious generals and their armies with triumphs, celebratory processions under temporary wooden arches. The enduring marble arches of Titus, Septimius Severus and Constantine, meanwhile, were erected during the Empire (27 BCE – 476 CE) to glorify their imperial namesakes.
According to classicist Mary Beard, the parading of captives and loot under triumphal arches underscored the “power of the Roman war machine and the humiliation of the conquered.”
Art historian Kirk Savage notes that early Americans preferred to honour exemplars of civic virtue with “words, not stones or statues.” The nation’s capital already bore Washington’s name — no need to sully it by aping Roman tyrants.
The American republic developed what R. Grant Gilmore, a specialist in historic preservation, calls a “clear, democratic architectural language” that spurned the strident jingoism of Roman monuments.
As later generations warmed to the idea of honouring the country’s great men on the National Mall, the capital’s designers continued to embrace neoclassicism while eschewing triumphal arches.
Instead, they favoured obelisks (the Washington Monument) and temples (the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials), which foreground public service and national unity.
An effort to build an arch honouring Ulysses S. Grant in 1901 was nixed in favour of a grand equestrian statue. While George Washington eventually got an arch, it was in Manhattan as part of the City Beautiful movement.
The absence of arches in Washington, D.C. was not an oversight but a conscious feature of a restrained brand of republicanism.
From Triomphe to Trump
Trump’s desire for an arch was sparked by a more recent precedent set by America’s first ally, France. However, Paris’s famous arch, the Arc de Triomphe, dates from one of the French Republic’s own detours into empire.
When Trump visited Paris in 2017, he was so impressed by the country’s Bastille Day demonstration of “military might” that he instructed his advisers to “top it.”
When Trump hosted his own parade in June 2025, it coincided with two birthdays: the U.S. Army’s 250th and his own 79th. He then set his sights on the Arc de Triomphe, which anchors the Bastille Day parade on the Champs-Elysées.
In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew France’s First Republic by donning a Caesarean laurel wreath. The next year, Emperor Napoleon commissioned a Roman-style arch to mark his Grande Armée’s victory at Austerlitz. Its foundation stone, dedicated to “Napoleon the Great,” was laid on his birthday in 1806.
Never mind that Napoleon died in exile long before his arch’s completion, several regime changes later, in 1836. Trump vowed to “blow it away in every way” with a 250-foot behemoth soon nicknamed the “Arc de Trump.”
Global arches
From Mexico City to Baghdad, diverse political movements have used arches to commemorate foundational moments, pivotal leaders and military triumphs and sacrifices.
Empire-building is a recurrent theme. London’s Wellington Arch stands as imperial Britain’s post-Waterloo refutation of Napoleonic invincibility. Benito Mussolini’s Arch of the Philaeni in colonial Libya featured engravings of Il Duce (“the Leader”) resurrecting the Roman Empire.
Had the Second World War played out differently, architect Albert Speer’s German triumphal arch would have loomed over the Third Reich’s imperial capital.
The meaning of arches, however, can evolve. After the First World War, the U.K. installed New Delhi’s India Gate as a tribute to Commonwealth casualties. Since India’s independence, it has anchored the country’s Republic Day celebrations as its National War Memorial.
The focus of Napoleon’s triumphal arch has likewise shifted to include both fallen soldiers and the victims of French imperialism. Since 1920, the Arc de Triomphe has housed France’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In 1999, a plaque acknowledged that the Algerian War (1954-1962) was an actual war, not a “pacification operation.”
Trump’s blasé attitude to the human costs of war (not to mention colonialism and slavery) is well-documented: will his arch acknowledge them?
A monument in search of meaning
Critics have expressed concerns about the proposed arch’s regulatory oversight, funding and impact on existing commemorative spaces. But another pressing question relates to its symbolism.
The U.S. is bitterly divided and mired in constitutional crisis. The president targets domestic opponents as well as the resources and territory of foreign allies and adversaries.
From imperial Rome to Napoleonic Paris, history’s arches glorified conquest, plunder and the strongmen who erected them.
Is this truly the message the Trump government wants to send as the American republic prepares to mark a major milestone?
Kelly Summers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. Trump wants an ‘Independence Arch’ — How famous arches warn about dangers to republics – https://theconversation.com/trump-wants-an-independence-arch-how-famous-arches-warn-about-dangers-to-republics-268748