Trump Admits He’s Building ‘Arc de Trump’ for ‘Me’
Donald Trump has framed all of his self-aggrandizing White House renovation projects as acts of generosity. Paving the Rose Garden to make it look exactly like his beloved Mar-a-Lago patio? The president repeatedly insisted he was just concerned about women’s high heels sinking into wet grass. The two huge flagpoles the president erected on the White House grounds? “They’ve needed flagpoles for 200 years!” Trump claimed.
The clearest example is the new White House ballroom, which will allow Trump to leave his indelible mark on the executive residence with the biggest renovation in decades. Though most people seemed fine with holding state dinners in (very elaborate) tents, Team Trump keeps describing the project as a “much-needed and exquisite addition.” The original press release even included a quote from White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, suggesting Americans are lucky to have Trump sharing his gifts.
“President Trump is a builder at heart and has an extraordinary eye for detail,” Wiles said. “The President and the Trump White House are fully committed to working with the appropriate organizations to preserving the special history of the White House while building a beautiful ballroom that can be enjoyed by future Administrations and generations of Americans to come.”
So it’s no surprise that Team Trump is presenting his latest project, a large arch modeled after Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, as anything but a presidential vanity project — though outsiders have already dubbed it the “Arc de Trump.”
Last week, Trump reposted a watercolor rendition of a “triumphal arch” to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary, which architect Nicolas Leo Charbonneau of Harrison Design had posted online a month earlier:
A proposal for a triumphal arch in DC for #America250, in the traffic circle in front of Arlington National Cemetery. America needs a triumphal arch! pic.twitter.com/JjwSZsOE9z
— Nicolas Leo Charbonneau (@nic_charbonneau) September 4, 2025
Constructing such a huge monument in the next year would be quite the feat. As NPR noted, “The design of any new federal building or memorial is supposed to be approved by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which is currently closed due to the government shutdown.”
During an October 15 fundraising dinner for donors to the White House ballroom, Trump showed off models of potential arch designs and suggested that commemorating the 250th anniversary isn’t the only reason to build the arch. Supposedly, the traffic circle between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial has been crying out for a giant monument.
“That’s Arlington Memorial Bridge,” Trump said. “And at the end of it, you have a circle that was built 150 years ago, nobody knows really when. You have two columns on one side, two columns on the other, yet in the middle, just a circle. And everyone in the past had said something was supposed to be built there. But a thing called the Civil War interfered. That’s a good reason.”
(These details don’t add up. The bridge was proposed three years after the Civil War ended, and it opened in 1932.)
Trump continued, “In 1902, they were going to put a statue of Robert E. Lee up. Would have been okay with me, would’ve been okay with a lot of the people in this room.”
(Again, it’s unclear what Trump is referring to. The bridge-planning commission did discuss erecting a Lee monument in a traffic circle, but those discussions took place in 1923.)
Though it didn’t get much attention, Trump offered a third, possibly more honest explanation for the project earlier on Wednesday. As reporters were being herded out of the Oval Office, CBS reporter Ed O’Keefe inquired about the arch model on display.
“Who is it for?” O’Keefe asked.
“Me. It’s going to be beautiful,” Trump answered.
The president’s off-the-cuff admission that he just likes building giant monuments to himself would be kind of refreshing if everything about his efforts to Trumpify D.C. weren’t so depressing.