Triomphe The Insult Comic's Arc de Trumpe

More proof the Germans won World War II

Berlin, 1945.

Americans are constantly being told, and not only by jingoes and sandbox-loving Trumpies, that we’re the lucky owners of the most powerful, most lethal, most all-around bitchenest military on the planet and/or in world history. This coming August will mark the 81^st anniversary of the last time we won a war.

Maybe I’m a born Eeyore, but the Trump administration’s Epsteiniran gamahuche strikes me as a poor candidate to liven up America’s moldy victory laps with a new lap dance. And that, my friends, is why we need a Trumpian Arch of Triumph in Arlington, Va., to grandly fuck up the view from the Lincoln Memorial to the Lee-Custis mansion on the other bank of the Potomac. Call it the ultimate reconciliation; the juxtaposition will turn our Civil War into the only one both sides won.

I lived 17 mostly happy years in Arlington, making me intimately familiar with the traffic turnaround that’s soon to be graced if the Potomac don’t rise (it should) by Trump’s predictably derivative and yet innovatively witless monument to somehow un-American bluster. Stick Paris’s original Arc de Triomphe next to our goiterized copy, and what have you got? Albino McDonald’s arches linking Napoleon’s and George S. Patton’s admirers at long last. Win-win again, people.

Maybe it isn’t irrelevant that the Arc de Triomphe, commissioned by a newly self-imperialized Napoleon in 1806, was only completed three regimes later. That was nine years after the world’s hoarsest Corsican punched the clock for the last time – no doubt pissed off, as usual, that it wasn’t bigger – on St. Helena. Picture Trump’s Arch sitting derelict and unfinished, like the sad rear half of a white elephant, until AOC cracks a bottle of anti-alcoholic vegan champagne over the finished structure midway through her third term. Real Americans have always suspected her of harboring Catherine the Great ambitions under that just-a-Bronx-barkeep Shinola.

Innocent friends who’ve never lived in Arlington have been puzzled by my dislike of Trump’s arch humor. How bad can something mimicking a famous monument in their beloved Paris be, rilly? Well, I’ve done time in Paris too. I was short-listed for the plum kitchen gig the hero of Ratatouille got, and talk about your DEI injustices.

But I try not to be bitter, so let’s proceed. Three virtues Paris’s public architecture generally honors are placement, proportion and symmetry. The Arc de Triomphe is ideally situated and proportioned to harmonize with the Champs-Elysḗes and the Place de la Concorde, respectively the vista’s thoroughfare and terminus. That’s despite having been laid out and realized under different regimes at different times with different aesthetic priorities. Baron Haussman’s high-handed revamp of central Paris under the Second Empire had to accommodate all three, and did.

Nobody would call it bombshell news that harmony isn’t Trump’s thing. I’ve written before and doubtless will again that, as fulsomely echt-Trumpian as his fanciful designs are on – sorry, for – Washington, the blunt-instrument eradication of the city’s if not the country’s past is not only his deepest passion but the part he can act on now. That is, without much in the way of reliable, potentially clogging official by-your-leaves.

One unpleasant truth that can’t be avoided is that his plans for a gloriously Trumpified nation’s capital resemble Albert Speer’s designs at Hitler’s behest for a gigantic, pastless new postwar Berlin to be known as Germania. Another, more reassuring truth is that Germania never got past the stage of being a big 3-D scale model that the addled Fuhrer spent increasing hours canoodling with as the war went phhht. It’s not hard to happily imagine Trump’s ghastly White House ballroom meeting the same fate.

I know I’ll be mighty surprised if it’s gotten past the blueprint stage by January 20, 2029. The procrastination will no doubt be aggravated by POTUS’s insistence on calling the things redprints or Trumpprints instead. That’s despite the near certainty that he’ll concentrate ever more obsessively on draconian altered-states décor as his other schemes get thwarted. If you’ll forgive me for mangling an old Paul Simon lyric, they’ll all go looking for the Gulf of America.

Yet in both cases, what porn connoisseurs call the money shot – destruction on a vast scale – will already have been accomplished. Berlin’s hash got settled by American and British bombers and Red Army artillery and tanks in 1945; whatever happens next, the White House’s East Wing is rubble for good. Don’t bet against the same being true soon of the Kennedy Center, a building, concept, and Camelot talisman Trump hates so much that sticking his name on it provided only inadequate and temporary respite. You know, like a dog pissing on sumac to mark its own territory.

If both spots end up as holes in the ground, that could reveal their true purpose. Trump may not get the Strait of Hormuz, but he’ll have two separate locations in Washington he can finally tell his ass from.

Where will this leave the massive new dreaming-of-a-very-white-Christmas ornament in what’s already America’s best-known traffic turnaround? Sticking out like a sore thumb at best, which appears to be its intent. Trump can’t imagine honoring anything about this country without first dishonoring whatever it’s meant to Americans up to now.

The current, soon to be pejoratively called “traditional” layout symbolizes grief and remembrance. It isn’t named Memorial Bridge for nothing. The wink of JFK’s eternal flame adds a cherry on top of George Washington’s eternal tree. Supposing Trump gets his way, all this will soon be incongruous impedimenta bracketing a braggart’s try at outdoing Ozymandias.

Again, ponder proportions. Trust a guy who’s spent lots of time circling this future construction site behind the wheel of his Sentra at rush hour. Do you know what the traffic girdling Trump’s arch will look and feel like? It will look and feel like a slew of roaches scuttling around the base of a toilet that’s just been noisily flushed.

Since our deepest desire nowadays is to blame Trump for everything, it puts a damper on my mood to acknowledge that D.C.’s readiness to accommodate Teutonic travesties of what it ostensibly stands for predates the rise and fall of his third reign. The most glaring eyesore exemplifying this bizarro-world Swatch-watchtika is Washington’s National World War Two Memorial, whose Prussian black eagles and utter lack of empathy for anything American used to put superannuated Good War veterans to flight as they screamed General Ike should have told them the Germans would win.

Still, you know what they say. The Kraut rots from the head (see “Base of a toilet,” supra). Our increasingly disheveled, decrepit, floundering President has long been the prisoner of two pasts. One is the unspeakably hideous imaginary America he thinks he’s resurrecting. The other is our actual past, which Trump loathes as if it’s a personal insult to him – and it is.

What they have in common is that they’re both yesterday’s news. But news that stays news, as Ezra Pound once defined modern poetry.