Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair: Trump’s Triumphal Flak-Tower

 Trump wants to push through to construct a 250 foot high “Triumphal Arch” at the traffic circle at the Arlington Cemetery end of the Memorial Bridge in Washington. The Arch has little or no support from anyone other than those attempting to either ingratiate themselves with Trump, or potential construction companies that would be responsible for the actual building project.

There will, no doubt, be an inscription saying something like “Built by your FAVOURITE President, Me, Donald Trump”. 

The size and positioning of the proposed Arch will fundamentally disrupt the visual flow from Arlington National Cemetery to the Lincoln Memorial and beyond, destroying the linkage between the 'glorious dead' in Arlington and Abraham Lincoln, the liberator of slaves and saviour of the Union. And it will, somehow, have Trump's name all over it. And Trump is pushing to begin construction. Considering that he has two more years in office, and that he is quite willing to ignore the courts, or push ahead with illegal programs pending the Supreme Court stopping him, there can be little doubt that the Arch will, to some degree or other, be built.

He thinks that he will get around any Supreme Court challenge by declaring that it will also be a military installation with snipers and will be used to “hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.” It will also be a drone facility, because every monument should also be a ‘drone base’ these days, even though the US Army has disbanded its only unit that was studying and preparing for, and to counter, drone warfare.

Basically, Trump is now saying that he wants to build a “Triumphal Flak-Tower”, and probably wants to pour enough concrete that, like the flak-towers in Berlin and other German cities, it will be too expensive to demolish.

There is another option.

Don’t fight the Arch. Or fight it, but don't let it distract from other, arguably more important issues (for starters, protecting the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 14th, and other Amendments to the Constitution).

Let him build as much of it as he can in his next two years, with every reasonably possible step taken to delay and slow the project. Then, when he is out, I propose:

1. Tear it down. Almost all of it. Keep only two metres of height from one corner, a footprint of maybe twenty to thirty square metres.
2. Lovingly retain that corner, with green green grass and a well worn dirt walkway around.
3. Remove, obviously, any mention of the name Trump from any signage. 
4. Install a marble plaque.
5. On the plaque, Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias", 1819 edition

No name on the plaque, no date of installation, weather the marble a bit to give a sense of time.