The challenge in picking Donald Trump’s favorite distraction is that the competition is brutally fierce. The president’s ballroom vanity project, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and the White House venue for the upcoming UFC fight are certainly near the top of the lengthy and growing list.
But don’t forget about his interest in a massive “triumphal” arch just across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial, in front of Arlington National Cemetery. The Washington Post reported:
Federal officials are laying more groundwork to begin construction on President Donald Trump’s planned 250-foot-tall triumphal arch, sharing additional documents that detail the project’s scope and an aggressive timetable for potentially completing work before Trump’s term ends.
According to National Park Service documents posted this month, the administration envisions 20 hours per day of construction on the arch, year-round, in hopes of completing the project within two to three years. Construction experts said that timeline — which would involve two 10-hour daily shifts — is aggressive for a nonemergency project.
To be sure, the controversy surrounding the arch was already messy. For one thing, there’s an ongoing lawsuit that may very well succeed. For another, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently told Congress that the project is only at the “discussion” stage, and when evidence to the contrary emerged, Rep. Jared Huffman of California, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, argued that the Cabinet secretary came “pretty damn close” to committing perjury.
In case that weren’t quite enough, the Washington Post reported last month that the administration was moving forward with plans to start work on the arch “by piggybacking on an existing, unrelated contract for engineering services” a mile away, which in turn would “allow the administration to bypass a potentially lengthy public bidding process.”
As a rule, when a White House has to rely on subterfuge to advance its ambitions, it’s a bad sign.
At this point, common sense might suggest that Congress would intervene, but the White House has already made clear that it intends to circumvent lawmakers. Trump was quite explicit on this point a few weeks ago, declaring at an Oval Office event, “We don’t need Congress to sign off on it. We’re doing it.”
But now that the details of the administration’s plan are coming into focus, the controversy has taken an even more farcical turn. Indeed, Trump and his team don’t just want an arch; they want it to be built at extraordinary speed, as if there were some kind of emergency need for the project. (There is not.)
The Post’s report added, “The arch also would be built with concrete clad in granite, unlike the nearby Lincoln Memorial and other monuments that were constructed with natural stone like marble and limestone — another way to expedite its construction, experts said.”