Rosie DiManno: The Arc de Trump is another loss for Washington - Toronto Star

President Donald Trump holds up a model for his proposed triumphal arch in Washington during a donors’ dinner at the White House on  October 15, 2025. 

Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno.

I’ll see you two dead Kennedys and raise you an arch.

The Dead Kennedys: Actually a terrific hardcore punk band in the ‘80s. But in current context, the graves of President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, both assassinated.

When President Donald Trump laid a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery on Remembrance Day, Veterans Day in the United States, it was a performative tableau amidst pushback from the Kennedy clan against his monstrous 76-metre (250-foot) triumphal arch, a vanity project — among a slew of tributes to self — that is being challenged through the courts.

As Trump admitted in an interview with New York Magazine this year, explaining why he’s hell-bent on proactively erecting legacy monuments, planting his face and name and follies across Washington, D.C.: “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”

Demonstrators protest against President Donald Trump’s planned arch at Memorial Circle in Washington on Oct. 1, 2026.

Trump covets the gilded marble arch, which would loom over a traffic circle just outside the cemetery’s main entrance, to be emblazoned with the slogan, “Golden Age of America.” Ruining the sweeping vista from the Lincoln Memorial, obstructing the sightline from the eternal flame at JFK’s gravesite, degrading the whole solemn experience and causing traffic snarls for the 150-or-so funerals held at the cemetery annually. Arlington is the final resting place of more than 400,000 active-duty service members, veterans and their family members. And JFK and Robert and Edward Kennedy — what the Kennedys describe as the emotional heart of the national shrine.

On Tuesday, nine members of the Kennedy family — but not the late Sen. Kennedy’s son, repellent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — formally joined a lawsuit filed against construction of what’s sarcastically been dubbed the Arc de Trump.

The project, which would dwarf the Arc de Triomphe in Paris by some 30 metres (about 100 feet), had drawn ire and lawsuits from three Vietnam War veterans, Arlington County, the state of Virginia and the District of Columbia.

“The gigantic proposed arch is an illegal interference with the Arlington National Cemetery and the heroes remembered there, including at the gravesites and memorials of the Kennedy brothers and Ethel Kennedy,” reads a statement issued by the Kennedy family’s lawyers. “Only Congress has the institutional power to authorize an intrusion of this magnitude.”

Further disturbing the tranquility of Arlington Cemetery would be, as Trump has recently suggested, turning the arch into a “military complex” housing fleets of drones and snipers, for alleged security purposes.