President holds up a rendering of a 250-foot triumphal arch he would like built across the Potomac.

The proposal, as displayed to reporters in the Oval Office on Saturday and circulated to donors at a private White House dinner the same week, calls for a 250-foot triumphal arch to be erected across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial. The structure, in the renderings prepared by Harrison Design, is finished in white stone, topped with a gilded statue of Liberty with outstretched gold wings, and inscribed with the phrase “One Nation Under God.” Four golden lions are positioned at its base.

For comparison: the Lincoln Memorial is approximately 99 feet in height. The Arc de Triomphe in Paris is 164 feet. The proposed Washington arch is 250 feet. It would, on the published renderings, materially alter the established sightlines between the Lincoln Memorial, the Memorial Bridge, and Arlington National Cemetery, all of which are designed, by the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission, to constitute a single unified ceremonial landscape.

The Commission of Fine Arts is the federal agency charged, since 1910, with reviewing the aesthetic merit of construction projects on the National Mall and adjacent federal land. By the end of October the President will have terminated all six of its sitting members. The agency will then be repopulated with appointees more amenable to the project. This is not speculative. The White House confirmed it.

The country is, on October 11, in day eleven of a federal government shutdown. The federal Park Service is operating at minimum staffing. The Smithsonian is closed. Funding for the proposed arch is to come, the administration has said, from “private donors.” The same funding mechanism is being used for the East Wing demolition, which begins in nine days.

A serious country builds monuments to commemorate things that are over. It does not build them, on a calendar collision, while it cannot pay the staff at the monuments it already has.

The arch, if built, would dwarf every existing memorial on the Mall except the Washington Monument. The dimensions are not accidental. They are the point. A monument’s whole job is to be larger than the thing across the river it is reframing.

What is across the river, in this case, is the Lincoln Memorial.

Calmly documenting the decline.