Heather Cox Richardson points to a sad contradiction: Trump plans to build a monumental arch while tearing down the federal building that symbolizes Social security and the belief that government should serve and protect the American people. Of course, this disregard for history is of a piece with his decision to pave over the Rose Garden, to cover the Oval Office with Walmart gold, and to construct a massive ballroom that will dwarf the White House. All of this makes sense to a man with no respect for history and tradition.
Unknown: Will the triumphal arch have a statue of Trump astride a horse?
Heather Cox Richardson writes:
Last Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump showed to Canadian officials a plan for a triumphal arch that would sit on the banks of the Potomac River opposite the Lincoln Memorial in a traffic rotary at the Virginia end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge below Arlington National Cemetery. The idea, apparently, is to build the arch to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States in July 2026.
On Thursday, the White House press pool reported, the plan was laid out on President Donald J. Trump’s desk in the Oval Office. The massive stone arch appears to be the same height as or taller than the Lincoln Memorial. Early in the morning on Saturday, October 11, Trump posted on social media an artist’s rendering of what such an arch might look like, complete with what appears to be a gold winged victory statue at the top of the arch.
Triumphal arches are free-standing structures consisting of one or more arches crowned with a flat top for engravings or statues. They hark back to ancient Rome, where leaders built them to commemorate military victories or significant public events. Those arches inspired others, like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France, built to honor those who died in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
Observers immediately noted that the photographed plan showed the Lincoln Memorial facing the wrong way, and compared the Trump Arch both to the Arc de Triomphe and to another arch modeled on it: the German Arch of Triumph proposed by Adolph Hitler to commemorate Germany’s victory in World War II.
That triumphal arch was never built.
Architect Eric Jenkins told Daniel Jonas Roche of The Architect’s Newspaper that the proposed arch would disrupt the symbolic connection between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The two are connected not only by the Arlington Memorial Bridge, but also by the Civil War. During that war, the nation began to bury its hallowed dead on the grounds of the former home of General Robert E. Lee, who led the troops of the Confederacy. Lee’s Arlington House sits directly behind the memorial to Lincoln, who led the United States to stop the Confederates from dismantling the nation.
The proposed construction of a triumphal arch contrasts with the expected sale and probable demolition of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building on Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C. Completed in 1940, the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building was built to house the Social Security Board, the precursor to the Social Security Administration.
In August 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. That law established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.
The vision of government behind the Social Security Act was very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men provided for their families on their own, those behind the Social Security Act recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality. They replaced that vision with one in which the government recognized that all Americans were equally valuable.
Their reworking of American government came from the conditions of the United States after the rise of modern industry. Americans had always depended on community, but the harsh conditions of industrialization in the late nineteenth century had made it clear that the government must protect that community. City governments like New York City’s Tammany Hall began to provide a basic system of social welfare for voters, making sure that they had jobs, food, and shelter and that women and children had a support network if a husband or father died.
Then, in the 1930s, the overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression showed that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, came to believe that, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”
And so Perkins pushed for the Social Security Act, the law that became the centerpiece and the symbol of the new relationship between the government and American citizens.
Once FDR signed the law, the next step was to create a building for its administrators. To decorate a building that would be the centerpiece of the government’s new philosophy, administrators announced a competition for the creation of murals to decorate the main corridor of the new building.
Among those who threw their hats into the ring was Lithuanian-born American artist Ben Shahn, one of the most sought-after artists in the United States, a social realist painter who designed murals to illustrate “the meaning of Social Security.” Shahn wrote: “I feel that the whole Social Security idea is one of the real fruits of democracy.” He set out to show that idea in his art.
Shahn depicted the evils of a world of economic insecurity, showing “endless waiting, men standing and waiting, men sitting and waiting, the man and boy going wearily into the long empty perspective of a railroad track.” He showed the “little girl of the mills” and “breaker boys working in a mine. The crippled boy issuing from the mine symbolizes the perils of child labor…a homeless boy is seen sleeping in the street; another child leans from a tenement window.” He showed “the insecurity of dependents—the aged and infirm woman, the helpless mother with her small child.”
Then he illustrated the alleviation of that insecurity through government support. He showed “the building of homes…[and] tremendous public works, furnishing employment and benefitting all of society… youths of a slum area engaged in healthy sport in handball courts…the Harvest—threshing and fruit-gathering, obvious symbols of security, suggesting also security as it applies to the farm family.”
Shahn finished the pieces in 1942, and said: “I think the Social Security mural is the best work I’ve ever done…. I felt I had everything under control—or almost under control—the big masses of color to make it decorative and the little details to make it interesting.”
Shahn’s work stood alongside that of Philip Guston, who depicted the well-being of the family under the Social Security Act; Seymour Fogel, whose portrait of security included children learning and a table piled with food; and sisters Ethel and Jenne Magafan, who were warned their mural in the boardroom should not distract the members, so they painted mountains in snow. Gray Brechin, the founder of the Living New Deal, a nonprofit that tracks the fate of New Deal art, told Timothy Noah of The New Republicthat the Cohen building is “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.”
But by the time Shahn and the other artists had completed their work, Noah explains, plans for the building had changed. The Social Security Administration never occupied it. First, the War Production Board, which managed the conversion of U.S. companies to wartime production, commandeered the building, and then in 1954 the Voice of America (VOA) moved in.
Like most federal buildings, the Cohen building is owned by the General Services Administration (GSA), to which the agencies in the building pay rent. With a total budget of $300 million, the VOA’s rent could not keep the building up, and in 2020, under the first Trump administration, the GSA told the VOA that it would have to vacate the building by 2028. During the Biden administration, Noah reports, the GSA proposed renovating the building to make it “a flagship in the federal government portfolio,” but before the report was widely circulated, Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) inserted into a water resources bill a provision to sell the building.
Now, although the market for commercial buildings is depressed, the Trump administration is proceeding with the sale.
Since taking office in January 2025, officials in the second Trump administration have made war on the vision of government embodied by the Social Security Act, promoting in its place a return to the rugged individualism that is even less true today than it was a century ago.
Now the administration is getting rid of the building built to house the Social Security Administration, along with the murals that champion the government’s role in protecting the equality and security of ordinary people, while Trump contemplates building a triumphal arch, carving MAGA ideology into the nation’s capital in stone.
