President Donald Trump wants a massive arch in Washington, D.C., and it now looks like he might get it: Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Thursday said excavation work would begin within the next two weeks.
But critics say he’s wasting time and money on the vanity project ― and it comes as the nation faces both an affordability crisis and an unpopular war that’s dragged on for more than six months with no end in sight.
Burgum wrote on X that the massive arch will be built at Memorial Circle on Columbia Island between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.
He called the site “a barren traffic circle” but ― using very Trumpian language ― said the arch would be “one of the Great Pieces of American Architecture” and that, when compared to other arches, this would be “the most spectacular and beautiful arch of them all!”
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Trump has spent much of his time in the Oval Office obsessing over decor and architecture.
“If you looked at a chart of his mind share — this I will say about getting into his mind: Seventy percent of it would be on his renovations,” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman told “The Ezra Klein Show” earlier this summer.
He’s added gold embellishments all over the White House, paved over the Rose Garden to turn it into a “club” resembling the patio at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, and knocked down the East Wing to make way for a massive ballroom.
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Trump has attempted to rebrand the Kennedy Center with his own name as part of a makeover, which is currently facing legal challenges, and ordered the botched renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool earlier this year.
Most of his critics didn’t love any of those projects.
And they certainly don’t love this latest one: