Gold Leaf and Gravestones

Arlington Cemetery deserves better than architectural narcissism.

The dignity of Arlington stands in stark contrast to proposals that confuse remembrance with self-promotion.

As I have on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend for the last nine years, last Sunday, May 24, 2026, I went to Arlington Cemetery to visit my parents’ grave. I actually go to the cemetery fairly frequently; it’s a peaceful and inspiring place, and being there on days which honor military service makes me feel connected to service members, buried there or not, whose service to this country over the last 250 years helped keep the United States free, democratic, and welcoming to all.

I drove into the cemetery and to the gravesite, which is located in a section situated in the southern area of the cemetery. This section is an active burial ground and, per the Arlington National Cemetery’s website, is the primary and final resting place for many service members killed during the War on Terror (Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom) as well as recently identified or repatriated World War II veterans. It also must serve as the final resting place for service members wounded during World War II, Vietnam, and/or Korea, who lived another several decades, because that describes my dad and seems to be the story of several of the service members buried nearby.

The peace and connection I felt during my visits to Arlington have been, since 2018, clouded by hot white fury due to a man who called service members who died in wars “suckers and losers,” and was then re-elected to the presidency.

Since Trump proposed the building of the “Arch,” an immense and garish memorial to himself, that fury has intensified. The design is Trumpian, almost beyond belief: oversized and overwhelming both the entrance to Arlington Cemetery and the memorial to Lincoln. That the “Arch” is enormous is bad enough; it also has a gold, winged statue of a female figure on top, a figure Trump says is Lady Liberty. (With Trump’s usual lack of accuracy, Lady Liberty in New York has no wings.)

The “Arch” as currently imagined is ghastly; the real offense of it, however, is that when Trump was asked who the “Arch” is for, he replied, “Me.”

We have been exposed to enough of Donald Trump’s ignorance, egotism, and unspeakably bad taste to be generally unsurprised by each new expression of any or all of those qualities. But this particular expression of hideousness, the “Arch,” is more than just his usual slapping of his name and gold leaf on various sites around the DC area. This one dwarfs two memorials to greatness: one to the graves of those who risked their lives and one to the president who managed to hold the union together. That Trump himself has said it is for him is, however, the real insult. Donald Trump has done nothing to strengthen the United States. In fact, he has done everything in his power to break our democracy, withdraw from our alliances and threaten our allies, weaken the rule of law, violate the rights of people in the United States, and limit free speech. He has started a war which is using up our stockpiles of weapons, weakening us in the world, without any explanation of what actual success looks like. And his war has increased costs and weakened economies the world over, including our own. He was elected to lower costs, and he’s done the opposite. He was elected to stop forever wars, and he may well have done the opposite of that.

Donald Trump is not fit to be in the presence of monuments to Lincoln or to our service people. He is not fit to put his “artistic” touches on any part of land that belongs to anyone other than himself. His moral failures, which are legion, his ignorance of so much history and so many lived realities of citizens of the world, are staggering, and each or both should have disqualified him from being president of the United States.

When I drive into Arlington Cemetery, I am reminded of the fact that, as President, Trump is entitled to be buried at Arlington Cemetery. If he is not punished for his actions and likely criminal behavior to date, I’m reasonably confident that recent accusations by members of the judiciary that his lawsuit against the IRS and subsequent “settlement” constitute fraud and a felony that might finally weaken the ground underneath him and drain away so much of the support he enjoys from the Republican Party.

It seems plausible that he might be impeached or leave office and slink out of Washington. At that point, he is free to go ahead and build that “Arch” in or all over Mar-A-Lago.

A girl can dream.

Margaret Henoch served in the Clandestine Service of the CIA for 25 years, at Headquarters and in the field, focusing on operations and counterintelligence and retiring as a Senior Intelligence Officer. She is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.