In the lead-up to America’s formal commemoration of the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, President Trump has announced a series of festivities and other major projects that will take place in the months ahead as part of the year’s ongoing national celebration.
Topping this list is the President’s announcement of a memorial arch located on Columbia Island in downtown Washington, with views overlooking the Potomac River, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Monument.
Construction on the arch is set to begin this year, with reports suggesting initial work could start over the next two months.
The proposed design of the arch includes classical columns, carvings of eagles, and decorative engravings like wreaths, evocative of many other neoclassical structures found across Washington.
The top of the arch is supposed to feature a majestic golden figure resembling an angel or Roman Victory, which the president described as Lady Liberty.
Adjacent to that figure are two robust eagles situated on either side, which would create an imposing presence for onlookers.
The arch is supposed to be quite massive in scale – at least as large as the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, a source of inspiration.
And if the President has any say in the matter, we can certainly expect it to be even larger.
Like the ballroom, the Triumphal Arch will be funded by private donations, so in that vein, it will be a public gift, another legacy project that will long outlast anyone involved in its creation today.
This move suggests that the President is channeling the venerable history of great American industrialists, like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who in a spirit of public altruism, bequeathed their country with some of its most renowned architecture, from grand concert halls to local township buildings, many of which remain standing and in use today.
The Triumphal Arch comes at a perfect time in our nation’s history. It can serve as a symbolic turning of the page from the self-hatred and moral decline of the past few decades, which reached a boiling point under Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Gone are the days of the self-loathing spirit that drove a left, fueled by the hostile rhetoric of angry Democratic politicians, to tear down statues and monuments dedicated to some of America’s finest statesmen, from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt.
The spirit of the Left has, over the last decade, been one of deconstruction: it has viewed all of Western history through an impenitently critical lens, finding fault behind virtually every great achievement from our storied past.
While it was only a small minority of leftists that actually flocked to the streets to tear down statues and burn historic buildings, many more in the Left’s supporting institutions, from academia to the legacy media to the Democratic Party – made it almost unlawful to say anything good about American history for a time.
For years the Left would condemn Americans, no matter their political affiliation or background, who celebrated the nation’s past.
Further, they would condemn those who still held in high esteem great statesmen, explorers, warriors, and visionaries from that past who, despite being imperfect men (at least through the Left’s puritanical framing), were nevertheless heroes who achieved feats that are unthinkable to most people living today, deserving of civilizational recognition.
Children were taught to hate their ancestors in schools, reinforced by apparatchiks in the mainstream media and an increasingly radical Democratic Party, which reinforced that hatred in the public square through backing legislation to take down statues of American heroes and rename everything from highways to sports teams, the result of political correctness gone haywire.
In many ways, all the Left’s moralizing reflected the vacuous ethical code of its most dogmatic evangelists, who would turn around and project their ugliness onto the rest of the country, an amalgamation of guilt masquerading as self-righteousness.
This produced diabolical forces that, to this day, threaten the very identity of America at its core, a sinister trend that is only now in abatement due to President Trump’s two historic victories.
President Trump is correct to understand his presidential victories as not merely political events, but much broader cultural transformations that signify a full stop to the absurdities experienced in American public life which really went mainstream under the presidency of Barack Obama.
In that regard, the President’s current projects in many respects are as much a spiritual denial of the Left’s cultural strides in recent years, inverting their ideology of deconstructionism with real-world monuments, physical statements of forward-looking pride and cultural positivity.
As a former builder himself, the President is right to intuit the essential gravitas in physical structures.
Among his many talents, the President is a master choreographer – he has an uncanny instinct, unlike any other politician alive today, of ascertaining the magnitude of a given situation, and then time and time again matches the moment with a resounding public display, which sends shockwaves across the political universe.
While the colloquially named “Arc de Trump” does not capture a particular moment in the way a great speech might, its construction at this pivotal time in American history is an exhibition once again of the President’s uncanny ability to deliver exactly what the country needs at this moment in time.
An arch is a formidable structure; it will stand, much like the Washington Monument, another grand obelisk, as a proud and colossal tribute to American greatness.
So many of Washington’s most beautiful structures are decades, even centuries old.
From the White House to the Capitol building to the Lincoln Memorial, as magnificent as these structures epitomize universal American values, they also stand tribute to the values and convictions of the people who built them.
It is not healthy for any society’s most lavish and ornate buildings to have all been constructed in the distant past.
Once a society feels that it cannot create great things in the present day, it begins to develop an inferiority complex which can devolve into helplessness and the kind of spiritual torpor so commonplace under the regimes of Obama and Biden.
Not only does it start thinking it is incapable of building anything great in the present day, but moreover, the society’s past greatness, embodied in those past structures, starts to almost overshadow the accomplishments of the present age, almost serving as if to remind the present caretakers of their infinite inadequacy.
This is not a good thing for any country. For, if a society’s greatness belongs entirely to its past, the monuments it presently venerates start to become mausoleums containing what it can no longer replicate.
Thus, any fresh building project that is erected in present times serves as something of an ego boost to everyone: a reminder that indeed greatness is not simply a preserve of the past but is available here too in the present if only we as a People move beyond the self-loathing to remind ourselves what made our nation so great, and why that is worthy of celebrating and reclaiming.
That, ultimately, is why President Trump’s memorial arch is so important for America at this time in our history.
For it serves as a reminder of not only what America achieved in its glorious past, but moreover, of all the untapped greatness that can still be ours, so long as we reclaim our convictions backed by the confidence knowing what we have achieved – and will again.
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