The United States’ relationship with France is not so simple. On the one hand: the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the French. On the other hand, the presidents: De Gaulle did not want to join NATO, Chirac did not want to take part in the war in Iraq, outraged Americans renamed the “French Fries” “Freedom Fries”. There are also language barriers: At the Gare Montparnasse there is a street musician who performs his favorite song by Paul McCartney, a song in which the letter H appears very often, but with which the French tongue struggles. “I will always be / oping, ‘oping / You will always be olding / olding my eart in yours,” the man sings to the amusement of the English-speaking tourists.
Trump recently made fun of such intonation barriers when he imitated President Macron. In reality, however, he sees himself in competition with France. “The only thing France has is history,” Trump once said. “You know, at some point we will have this story too.” Which is why Trump has now presented plans for a triumphal arch that he wants to have built in Washington based on the model of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
Musk and Zuckerberg dream of the grandeur of ancient Rome
This in turn refers to models from ancient Rome – and this is clearly the secret place of longing for the new rulers of America: Elon Musk had his data center called “Colossus” and had his photo taken in the Colosseum, where he also planned a fight against Mark Zuckerberg, who in turn walks around with a T-shirt with the inscription “Aut Zuck aut nihil”, an allusion to the Latin phrase “Aut Caesar aut nihil”, which in short means that he is at least sees him as the new Caesar; the hairstyle also fits.
Is Trump’s arc also about staging America’s present as a new antiquity? The President’s Arc de Trump will be 76 meters high, higher than the nearly 50-meter-high Arc de Triomphe in Paris, commissioned by Napoleon in 1806 to commemorate him and the Battle of Austerlitz. And also significantly higher than the currently tallest triumphal arch in the world, which is in Pyongyang, which suggests that the height of newer triumphal arches could be a kind of reverse indicator of democracy.
A winged, golden goddess of victory is enthroned on Trump’s arch, supported by eagles. However, in the model photos, from some angles these eagles look like fists with their middle fingers raised. If no one noticed and the arch was built like this, they would stand as a reminder of a time when there was still resistance to Trump.
If no one noticed this and the arch was built like this, they would be readable as a reminder of a time when there was still criticism of the golden president. But despite isolated protests, it is becoming increasingly quieter in the capital. Many conservative Americans have been calling for new national symbolic buildings for a long time, most recently the architecture critic and New Urbanism supporter Catesby Leigh, who wrote that America has had enough of the “history-forgotten memes of the Woke movement or the aesthetic barrenness of architectural modernism”; a triumphal arch would remind America of its pursuit of Union harmony and its historic greatness.
Trump’s answer to the question of what the arch with the golden goddess should commemorate other than 250 years of independence from Europe and for whom it was being built was different and clear. It read: “For me.” But the story that Trump wants to conjure up with his arch also gives hope to critics of the “vibe shift” – especially the French one: Long before the Paris Arc de Triomphe was finished, the person who planned it was banished to a very remote island.
