This could be a make-or-break week for President Trump's triumphal arch.
For months, the Trump administration has barreled toward his dream of building a 250-foot arch in Washington, D.C.: rubber-stamping and side-stepping various federal reviews, cutting out Congress and announcing imminent construction despite a lack of final approval and an ongoing legal battle.
In May, the entirely Trump-appointed Commission for Fine Arts approved the arch's design — still incomplete at the time. In September, a federal council packed with Trump allies abruptly terminated a historic preservation review that participants had already criticized as rushed.
It all comes to a head on Thursday, when the National Capital Planning Commission will meet to consider final approval for the controversial structure. The arch is the only item on the agenda; the meeting will be online-only and is expected to take five hours because of the high volume of public participation.
Nearly 120 concerned citizens have signed up to speak, an unusually high number for such meetings and a symbol of the widespread public opposition. Democratic lawmakers, veterans, historic preservationists and more than 100,000 people have spoken out against the arch in written comments, local protests and previous commission meetings.
Among their many concerns, critics say the structure would obstruct an important view, insult service members buried on the hallowed ground of nearby Arlington National Cemetery and add a layer of risk to notoriously complicated D.C. airspace. They see the arch as part of Trump's unilateral effort to memorialize himself in the nation's capital.
The White House has repeatedly said the arch will "enhance the visitor experience at Arlington National Cemetery" and be "one of the most iconic landmarks not only in Washington, D.C., but throughout the world."
"It will be one of the great things we've ever done," Trump said from the Reflecting Pool on Monday, giving the arch — alongside several other D.C. construction projects — valuable airtime in his last in-person remarks before the midterm elections.
The planning commission is widely expected to greenlight the arch. It approved preliminary site and building plans over the summer, and its new Trump-appointed chair, Mark Paoletta, expressed his enthusiastic support for the arch in an op-ed published last month. The administration says that after a successful commission vote, all that's needed to break ground is sign-off from its own Department of the Interior.
In fact, the government notified a federal judge late last month that, pending those two approvals, "construction could commence as early as" Thursday.
It filed that notice as part of the ongoing lawsuit brought by Vietnam War veterans and an architectural historian who argue the arch is unlawful without approval from Congress. The Trump administration has not sought that, instead citing Congress' century-old authorization of a pair of columns on that traffic circle that were ultimately never built.
The plaintiffs promptly asked District Judge Tanya Chutkan to issue a preliminary injunction before Thursday's meeting to block the administration from "taking any steps to construct, or to direct or facilitate construction, of any structure in Memorial Circle, absent congressional authorization" while the case plays out.
A group of advocacy, historic preservation and conservation organizations quickly signed on to a supporting brief. At a hearing last Friday, Chutkan heard from both sides and expressed skepticism about the government's sense of urgency and national security claims. Then, over the weekend, D.C. and Virginia jointly filed their own lawsuit, calling the arch "flagrantly illegal" for a whole host of reasons.
Chutkan has consolidated the two cases, with all eyes on her docket as Thursday's meeting ticks closer.
On Monday, the judge ordered the government to notify the court within one hour of any arch decision by the National Capital Planning Commission, National Park Service and Department of the Interior — and to provide notice within 30 minutes of "any activity related to or in preparation for the construction of an arch on Memorial Circle."
Chutkan's order suggests she may wait to issue a ruling on construction until after the planning commission meeting, which is scheduled to adjourn at 6 p.m. ET.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration asked Chutkan to clarify and to modify her order to require 24 hours' notice instead, explaining that even though its staff is "working diligently (including nights and weekends) on this matter, it takes time for decisions to be communicated through the various chains and then appropriately drafted into a notice suitable for filing with the Court."
The plaintiffs responded with their own filings, opposing that request. They compared the situation to that at D.C.'s East Potomac Park, where the government provided the judge in that case less than a full day's notice before cutting down 430 trees during a holiday weekend.
"Indeed, Defendants recently demonstrated just how much they can change the status quo in a matter of 24 hours," the lawyers wrote.
The judge later clarified her wording but kept the timeline the same.
Hours later, on Wednesday night, the government notified the court that Grunley Construction Company, a Maryland-based firm, "may be — but is not necessarily — arranging off-site preparations for construction mobilization in anticipation of permit approval."
How we got here — and what could happen next
The first registered speaker on the meeting agenda is plaintiff Michael Lemmon, the veteran and retired foreign service officer for whom the lawsuit is named. Lemmon has said he hopes to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery one day — but not if there's an arch.
"The thought of being interred in the shadow of what I believe to be a personal vanity project is profoundly disturbing to me," he wrote in a court filing in February, when the case was first filed.
The arch would stand 250 feet tall in Memorial Circle, a traffic circle on the bridge that links D.C.'s National Mall to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. It would be more than twice the height of the nearby Lincoln Memorial and, by the National Park Service's own admission, disrupt the historical significance of dozens of nearby monuments.
Renderings submitted to the planning commission show a white concrete structure topped with three golden statues, including a winged woman holding a torch with an eternal flame.
That flame was one of the recommendations of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which said in September that the arch would not pose a hazard to airspace as long as it is continuously lit a certain way. Aviation safety experts told NPR that those unconventional lighting recommendations add a new layer of risk — like glare and fire hazards — to an already troubling proposal.
Just days after the FAA released its report, Trump announced on social media that the arch would actually serve as a military complex housing snipers and ammunition. Legal experts saw that abrupt rebrand as an attempt to cast the arch as a matter of national security, an argument that has so far helped the administration proceed with its controversial White House ballroom.
The final renderings sent to the planning commission don't mention drones or snipers. But in a seven-page declaration submitted to the court last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the arch a "generational national defense opportunity."
On Friday, Chutkan questioned how the government would square installing military equipment with accommodating what it has said could be up to 22,000 civilian visitors per day.
"The arch is somehow supposed to deter assassination attempts on the president?" she said, in response to the government attorney's answers. "It's going to be completed three years from now."
As the legal battle over the arch intensifies, one of the Trump administration's primary arguments is that the veterans don't have standing to sue. They point to the Supreme Court's ruling in the ballroom case, though Public Citizen — the group representing the veterans — says the two are very different.
It's in that context that the Democrat-led governments of D.C. and Virginia jumped into the fray with their own lawsuit this weekend. Their 55-page complaint details their grounds for suing as well as the "battery of irreplaceable injuries" they say their communities will suffer "as soon as construction begins — from disruptions of local traffic to environmental degradation to threats to security and emergency preparedness."
The jurisdictions argue that the arch is illegal without congressional authorization and violates federal environmental and historic preservation laws as well as D.C.'s restrictions on building heights.
They say an arch would "substantially disrupt daily life in the capital region," including by forcing local governments to divert resources away from other priorities. The lawsuit says an arch at that location would increase traffic and hinder emergency response along one of the main corridors between D.C. and Virginia, complicate the flight path of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and threaten local wildlife, all things that governments would have to spend time and resources addressing.
They also have concerns about the construction process itself — from 320-foot cranes disrupting already-complex airspace to excavation work sending sediment into the Potomac River.
"These harms cannot be remedied if construction of the Arch proceeds," the complaint reads, adding that "the unlawful construction of a project of this scale will be difficult to undo."
The Trump administration has said construction will take two to three years, with crews working 20 hours a day, year-round. It said in a court filing last week that the first six months will involve underground excavation and foundation work, arguing that there is no need for a judge to intervene at this stage because plaintiffs' concerns about the lost view would not be relevant.
But lawyers for D.C. and Virginia say the administration "would suffer no cognizable injury if required to wait before beginning construction of an illegal monument."
"Defendants cannot plausibly claim they have an urgent need to begin building the Arch 101 years after enactment of the statute that they (wrongly) claim authorized its construction and over one year after the President announced his intention to build it," they wrote.
Critics have accused Trump of trying to rush approval of the arch before this week's midterm elections. Democratic lawmakers filed a supporting brief in the suit, with several vowing they will not let the arch proceed if their party retakes control of Congress.
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