CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Trump’s Triumphal Arch

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Surprise!  The Trump-appointed federal Commission of Fine Arts approved construction of the 250-foot triumphal arch that the president plans to erect between Washington’s Lincoln Memorial and the Arlington National Cemetery.  And this despite Trump’s rejection of the Commission’s recommendation to 86 (if you’ll pardon the expression) the giant golden angel and eagles that he insists will top a structure almost twice the height of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe.

 Most discussion of the Arc de Trump has focused on the project’s proposed size, statuary details, location, and legal authorization. The dominant themes voiced by critics are the president’s execrable taste in architecture, his contempt for tradition, and his neurotic need to immortalize himself in stone.  What nobody talks about much is the deep, disturbing symbolism of the triumphal arch, which takes us way beyond Donald Trump’s personal failings.

For more than two millennia the purpose of this type of construction has been to celebrate an empire’s military victories and the glory of its emperor. The most vivid illustration, perhaps, is the Arch of Titus, built in the first century to celebrate the triumph of the Roman emperor Titus and his father Vespasian over the Jews of Palestine in the “Jewish War” of 66-70 CE.  Casualties in that war, in which Roman soldiers besieged Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple, numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The carvings on the arch’s inner passageway show the triumphal procession of Roman legionnaires carrying the spoils of the Temple, including a seven-branched Menorah, up to the Temple of Jupiter on Capitoline Hill.

Hurrah for Emperor Titus!  Hurrah for Septimius Severus, whose triumphal arch memorializes Rome’s victory (temporary, as it turned out) over the Parthians of Iran!  Hurrah for Constantine the Great, who built an even larger arch to celebrate his triumph in a civil war and Roman victories over Britain and other nations that dared to resist Roman authority.  And, fifteen centuries later, hurrah for the emperor Napoleon I, whose Arc de Triomphe in Paris celebrated his smashing victory over the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz.

Why didn’t the founders of the United States build a triumphal arch in their new capital of Washington D.C., which was filled with neoclassical architecture?  If America’s greatest historical novelist, Gore Vidal, were still with us, he would answer that this was because, once upon a time, the USA defined itself as a republic. The colonnaded and domed buildings beloved by the nation’s founders were intended to evoke republican Rome and democratic Athens –cities ruled by elected leaders responsible to the people, not by an emperor hoping to become a god.

That republic defined “the people” in a way that we now recognize to be severely limited by racism, classism, homophobia, and misogyny.  But the founders did........

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