Memorial Day, the Triumphal Arch, and the Veterans Suing to Block America's 250th Birthday Arch

How CBS Laundered Trump Derangement Through a Memorial Day Profile

On Memorial Day, the country pauses to honor the men who died in its uniform, and the men who came home and continued to serve the republic in quieter ways. It is a day for plain speech about loyalty, sacrifice, and the difference between the two. So it is worth being plain about the piece CBS News published this morning under the headline, “For a group of Vietnam vets, opposing Trump’s arch is about being ‘loyal to the country.’” The piece profiles Shaun Byrnes and Jon Gundersen, two of the Vietnam veterans who, alongside a third veteran and an architectural historian, sued in February to stop construction of the 250-foot Triumphal Arch planned for Memorial Circle on Columbia Island, the empty traffic circle between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. CBS frames them as career diplomats, decorated veterans, and reluctant non-partisans who have been roused from retirement by a uniquely alarming threat to the republic. The framing is the story. The men are props. And the framing collapses the moment one consults the public record.

Consider how the framing works. CBS allows Byrnes to compare the arch to the architecture of “authoritarian dictatorships,” which he says have “no rule of law, no consent of the governed,” and “monuments for the leaders.” CBS reports, with no audible skepticism, that both Byrnes and Gundersen view the arch as a monument to Trump rather than to the country’s 250th anniversary. The reader is invited to receive this as the sober judgment of patriots who have set politics aside. The reader is not told that Gundersen appeared in a 2020 video titled “Vietnam Vet and Ukraine Diplomat Talks Voting Against Trump as a Republican,” that he has spent years using his veteran status to attack the president’s Ukraine policy from a maximalist pro-Kyiv posture, or that Byrnes publicly attacked President Trump and Richard Grenell when they brokered the Kosovo-Serbia normalization, preferring the conflict to continue. The reader is not told that the burial threat in the piece, Byrnes saying he would “reconsider” interment at Arlington if the arch is built, is a rhetorical device, not a policy objection. The reader is told only what the framing requires.

Here is the first thing the framing requires the reader not to know. The monument was approved by Congress, on this site, one hundred years ago. In 1924, the federal commission charged with designing the Arlington Memorial Bridge produced a report laying out a broader monumental composition for the bridge and its approaches across the Potomac. Within that plan, Columbia Island was envisioned as a monumental setting for a pair of 166-foot columns, each surmounted by a gilded Nike, one symbolizing the Union and the other the South, framing the entry to Arlington National Cemetery. The 1924 report drew an explicit comparison, noting that the columns would stand “practically of the same height as the Colonne de Juillet in Paris,” the gilded bronze column in the Place de la Bastille topped by the “Génie de la Liberté.” Congress ratified the report in 1925. The bridge was built. The columns were not. In 1931, the Department of Commerce warned that 166-foot columns would interfere with nearby airfields, and President Hoover ordered them removed from the plans. The bridge opened in 1932 without them.

Anyone who has flown in or out of Reagan National in the last 20 years can supply the obvious update. Modern jets do not skim the Potomac at 166 feet. The 1931 air-traffic objection is a museum piece. The site has been a vacant ceremonial circle for nearly a century not because Americans changed their minds about wanting a monument there, but because Hoover-era propellers could not clear it. That is the actual history. CBS’s profile contains none of it.

The second thing the framing requires the reader not to know is what the proposed arch actually is. Critics, including Public Citizen’s Wendy Liu, who is representing the plaintiffs, insist that “columns aren’t an arch, 166 feet isn’t 250 feet, and the 1924 report has nothing to do with what Trump is proposing.” This is technically true in the way that saying a violin is not a viola is technically true. The renderings submitted to the Commission of Fine Arts show the main arch mass rising to a roofline of 166 feet, the exact height of the original 1924 columns, with the additional elements bringing the total to 250 feet, one foot for each year of American independence. The architect, Nicolas Charbonneau of Harrison Design, has preserved the original authorized dimension and added an arch above it, replacing the twin Nikes with a single winged Lady Liberty holding a shield and a torch, flanked by two golden eagles. The arch is not a repudiation of the 1925 plan. It is, quite literally, the 1925 plan with an arch placed over the approved columns and Lady Liberty replacing the genie.

You can disagree with the legal sufficiency of the 1925 authorization. Lawyers will argue about whether the Commemorative Works Act of 1986 requires a fresh congressional vote, and judges will decide. That is what courts are for. But the argument the CBS-profiled veterans are actually making, which is that an arch on Columbia Island is a sudden authoritarian intrusion into a sacred sightline, runs directly into the fact that Congress endorsed a 166-foot vertical monument at exactly this spot a century ago, and that the new design preserves that approved height as its base.

The third thing the framing requires the reader not to know is the institutional pathway the project is taking. Authoritarian regimes do not submit their monuments for review. The Trump administration submitted this one to the US Commission of Fine Arts in April, received preliminary approval, returned with revisions, and was approved a second time on Thursday, May 21, 2026. The revisions removed an eight-foot base and four gold lions, the lions struck at the CFA’s own request on the entirely sensible ground that lions “are not native to the United States.” Total height came down from over 280 feet to 250 feet. The project now goes before the National Capital Planning Commission on June 4. There are commissioners, public hearings, design revisions, and a litigation track running in parallel. Whatever else this is, it is not the architecture of dictatorship. It is the architecture of a republic, with all of the republic’s customary slowness, second-guessing, and revision built in.

Now, having cleared the framing, consider the affirmative case for the arch itself, which CBS treats as unspeakable. The site is not a blank circle awaiting protection. It is the Virginia anchor of the most ceremonial sightline in the capital, running from Lincoln across the Memorial Bridge to Arlington House and the cemetery beyond. The 1925 Congress understood the site demanded a vertical monument and approved one. The 2026 design completes that intention with a single triumphal arch rather than two unrealized columns, marks the 250th anniversary of the founding with a one-foot-per-year total height, and frames the gateway to Arlington with a sculptural program of Liberty, eagles, and the inscriptions “One Nation Under God” and “Liberty and Justice for All.” The arch would stand taller than the 160-foot Arc de Triomphe in Paris, taller than the 220-foot Monumento a la Revolución in Mexico City, and taller than the 197-foot Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang. Trump’s stated rationale, that Washington is the only important world capital without a triumphal arch, is not vanity. It is the same instinct that built the Lincoln Memorial in the shape of a Greek temple and the Jefferson Memorial in the shape of a Roman rotunda. Republican capitals borrow the grammar of classical monumentality because the grammar works. It is how civic confidence is rendered in stone.

Critics will reach, as Byrnes does, for the line about “monuments for the leaders.” This requires forgetting that the Washington Monument is named for a leader, the Lincoln Memorial is built for a leader, the Jefferson Memorial is built for a leader, and Mount Rushmore is leaders all the way down. The Triumphal Arch, by contrast, is named for nothing but the country’s 250th birthday, carries no portrait of any sitting officeholder, and is topped by Liberty herself. Trump’s offhand “me” comment at an October 2025 donor dinner is the slender thread on which the entire “monument to the leader” theory hangs, and even the most generous reading of that line places it well within the long tradition of presidents joking about their own legacies. Lincoln joked about his looks. Reagan joked about his age. Trump joked about an arch. The Republic survived all three.

What it may not survive, eventually, is the slow erosion of the distinction between non-partisan public service and partisan public theater. Career diplomats and Vietnam veterans are owed every honor a free country can give them. They are not owed, and should not claim, a presumption of disinterested judgment when they have spent years on the public record opposing a president by name. CBS owes its audience the context. The plaintiffs owe their readers the candor. Memorial Day owes its dead something better than another laundered talking point.

The arch will be built or it will not, on the merits, through the institutions designed to decide such questions. That is how a republic handles its monuments. The men trying to stop it should at least be honest about why.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly.