My Testimony Against Trump’s Vanity Arch that Desecrates Arlington Natl Cemetery

My testimony before the National Capital Planning Commission against Trump’s arch at Arlington.I was a combat photographer and public affairs sergeant with the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, deployed to Iraq in 2004, and I’m the daughter of two retired National Park rangers. I came to the commission as the person this arch claims to honor and the person raised to protect what it would destroy. It betrays both.The Park Service’s own report says the arch can be built 20 hours a day, year round, for up to three years, under cranes taller than the arch itself. Arlington buries its dead close to thirty times a day. Under this plan, families would lower their loved ones into the ground to the sound of pile drivers. We ask our dead for everything. The least we owe them is silence, and for three years we would deny them even that.Memorial Circle looks like empty lawn. It isn’t. It was left open on purpose, so the line between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington could hold its meaning: a country made whole after the Civil War. The excuse for skipping Congress is a ninety-year-old permission for two columns we were wise enough never to raise.Free nations build arches to the dead, not to their living rulers. America’s own Commemorative Works Act forbids a memorial to any person until twenty-five years after their death, so history, not vanity, decides. Asked who this arch was for, President Trump said, “Me.” America does not gild the living. Dictators do.On June 4th this commission refused to approve the arch and demanded answers on its height, on air traffic, on pedestrian safety. Those problems have not been cured, and the deepest ones cannot be. Congress never authorized it. The design was sole-sourced to avoid open bidding. And Interior now swears it is “not a memorial,” even as the President calls it his, so it can slip past the law entirely.This is National Park Service land, meant in the words of the Park Service’s own founding law to stay “unimpaired for those who come after us.” I asked the commission to reject this arch.This is my testimony to the National Capital Planning Commission on July 9 against Trump’s arch at Arlington. The vote happened, but the fight isn’t over. Call your representatives and tell them Congress never authorized this. Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe