President Trump said in an interview with Politico that construction of the Triumphal Arch is set to begin in about two months.
“It hasn’t started yet. It starts sometime in the next two months. It’ll be great. Everyone loves it,” Trump told Politico over the phone. “They love the ballroom too. But they love the Triumphal Arch.”
The monument, designed to be similar to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, will be privately funded.
Discussing plans for the construction in October, President Trump said the arch will be built at the Arlington Memorial Bridge, explaining that at the end of the bridge, there is “a circle that was built 150 years ago, nobody knows really when, and in fact they put a couple of columns on each side, you have two columns on one side, two columns on the other. But yet, in the middle, there’s a circle and everyone that passes it says something was supposed to be built there. But a thing called the Civil War interfered.”
Later, in 1902, President Trump described, “they were gonna put a statue of Robert E. Lee up. Would’ve been okay with me, a lot of people wouldn’t have liked it, would’ve been okay with me, would’ve been okay with a lot of other people in this room, but they didn’t do that.”
“So for years and years it sat, and every time somebody rides over the beautiful bridge going right to the Lincoln Memorial, it’s so beautiful, they literally say something supposed to be here,” he added.
