Trump Cites National Security on Press Ban, DC Arch+
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| A replica of the proposed 250-foot triumphal arch at the Great American State Fair in June. What was envisioned as a project to honor America’s 250th anniversary, President Trump said, is now also set to be a military depot.Credit...Alex Kent/The New York Times |
As President Trump tries to barrel through legal and political pushback on fronts ranging from press freedom to his triumphal arch, he is increasingly using a justification he believes will allow him to do what he wants: national security.
The president has cited national security as a reason to build a fancy new ballroom on White House grounds and to investigate leaks to journalists that embarrassed his administration.
He has invoked national security in stripping union rights from thousands of federal workers and deploying the military to the Mexican border to crack down on migrants.
He has cited national security as a reason to pause the construction of wind farms off the East Coast and exempt oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from protections for endangered species of whales.
On social media, Mr. Trump has argued that the ban he initiated last week on CNN, MS Now and Politico entering the White House grounds was necessary because they were a “threat to our national security.”
Perhaps nowhere was the reasoning more sudden, or curious, than his announcement on Sunday that he was transforming his plans for a 250-foot triumphal arch on a Washington roundabout, which are under legal challenge.
What was envisioned as a project to honor America’s 250th anniversary, Mr. Trump said, would now also be a military depot, outfitted with “large numbers of drones,” snipers and ammunition. It is unclear what the arch, which would lie between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, would protect.
“Courts historically have been deferential to the executive branch in matters of national security, and that is due to the president’s role as commander in chief,” said Barbara McQuade, a University of Michigan Law School professor and a former U.S. attorney. “But it’s not a 100 percent Trump card. If the president invokes the national security rationale frivolously, then he could undermine the power for future presidents who need to invoke it legitimately.”
Mr. Trump has found mixed success in pursuing his national security claims in court.
They featured most prominently in a lawsuit over his ballroom project at the White House. In that case, federal courts distinguished the parts of the project legitimately needed for security, such as an underground bunker, and allowed work on them to proceed, while finding that the aboveground ballroom should be halted without congressional approval. Ultimately, the Supreme Court allowed the entire project to proceed without deciding that issue by dismissing the lawsuit on technical grounds.
Before the president’s surprise announcement, the idea that the arch would have a military or security purpose had not appeared among the administration’s arguments for the project in court. The Justice Department has argued, instead, that the administration is operating under the assumption that it has century-old permission from Congress.
In 1925, Congress passed a bill authorizing construction of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, including a pair of 166-foot-tall columns in the plaza where Memorial Circle is now. Those columns were later dropped from the plans. But the administration has argued that the authority to build them — indeed, to convert them into a far larger arch — still remains.
The administration has gone to great lengths to incorporate that legal logic into the planning, design and public pitch for the project. The main body of the arch is designed to be 166 feet tall, nodding to the earlier proposal. And the National Park Service, which administers the land, has said in documents that it cannot consider relocating the arch somewhere less intrusive because it is “grounded in the historic design intent” for this location.
The administration has effectively spent months tying the legal strategy for the project to this historical story. But the president appeared this week to be shifting strategy, with perplexing consequences.
Public plans for the arch treat it as a tourist attraction, allowing as many 80 people an hour to visit an observation deck offering grand views of the capital. The administration has also been developing new traffic patterns to ease pedestrian access. If the arch is intended, however, to store ammunition, and for its roof to host snipers and drones, it would make little sense to welcome hundreds of tourists a day, since easy access by the public would probably be a security liability.
Federal laws establish requirements for the safe storage of arms, ammunition and explosives that necessitate a level of security at odds with Mr. Trump’s stated desires for the site.
Ammunition would probably need to be placed in an earth-covered bunker — potentially one fully underground beneath the proposed arch — and the entire site would need to be protected with a mix of tall fencing, cameras, intrusion alarms and expensive high-security locks. Firearms could probably be stored inside the arch in what the government calls a ready-service locker.
All of those security devices would have to be certified by the General Services Administration, and the fencing alone would make the site much more difficult for tourists to visit.
If enough ammunition is stored at the site, the project could require the permanent closure of nearby roadways. Those could include the road to the main entrance to Arlington National Cemetery, as well as the George Washington Parkway — a major thoroughfare along the Potomac River that carries more than 70,000 vehicles per day.
A White House spokesman did not respond to specific questions about the changing plans for the arch, except to point to the president’s social media comments.
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| Note: The 3-D model of the arch is based on a design submitted to the U.S. National Park and overlaid on a scene from Google Earth. Junho Lee/The New York Times. |
Representative Donald S. Beyer Jr., a Democrat who represents the Northern Virginia district that includes Arlington National Cemetery, said Mr. Trump’s plan to “make his vanity arch an ammunition depot for ‘snipers’ in a location where snipers have never been needed would place a large weapons cache within feet of thousands of tourists, pedestrians, cyclists and drivers on major commuter traffic thoroughfares and Metro’s Blue Line.”
Mr. Beyer said such a drastic change in the arch’s purpose would “necessitate a redo of all prior impact studies, some of which remain unreleased if they were ever done at all.”
The arch’s location, at a remove from Washington’s highest-value targets, would seemingly also limit its effectiveness for security. Well-trained snipers in the U.S. military can hit targets about three-quarters of a mile away, meaning they could engage a threat only about as far as the Lincoln Memorial, far out of reach of the White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Pentagon or the bulk of the National Mall.
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Source: Aerial image from Nearmap. Junho Lee/The New York Times.
However, Mr. Trump’s insistence that he would need to launch drones from the arch is undercut by the presence of an active Army post, Fort Myer, about a mile directly west of the site, where such aircraft could be securely stored and deployed.
Kimberly Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore, said Mr. Trump’s push to use national security as a justification for so many actions should be viewed in the broader context of his maximalist approach to executive power, and the push to expand presidential powers in post-9/11 America.
“In Project 2025 and building since then is this idea that the president is actually supposed to function as a de facto sovereign,” Ms. Wehle said. “Donald Trump is taking that idea and imposing it across the board.”
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