We’re learning more about the monument Trump wants to build in honor of himself, a giant arch that American taxplayers happen to be paying for, although now no one is sure how much the thing will cost.

There are finally some drawings, and man, this thing is ugly, even by Trump standards.

Originally, the arch was supposed to be 165 feet tall, but thanks to the addition of the terrifyingly huge, golden 24-foot eagles and a 60-foot-tall Lady Liberty, it’s now going to be 250 feet tall at the highest point, dwarfing the 99-foot-high Lincoln Memorial. But wait! There’s more gold. Four golden lions, to be precise, and “One Nation Under God” inscribed in gold.

Though Trump has previously said that the arch is literally for him, one of his spokespeople is now saying that the arch will be “a visual reminder of the noble sacrifices borne by so many American heroes throughout our 250-year history so we can enjoy our freedoms today.”

Yeah, not so much. Turns out the giant gross arch destroys a core part of 1902’s McMillan Plan, which redesigned the capital city after the Civil War, creating the National Mall and the core of Washington. As WaPo’s architecture critic Philip Kennicott explains, it was a “vision of national healing and reconciliation that symbolically reconnected the North and the South by a bridge across the Potomac.”

From the Lincoln Memorial, you can see all the way to the one for Ulysses S. Grant, and those who lost their lives in the war were honored by the Arlington Memorial Bridge that leads to the cemetery. Now, that sight line will be blocked by the arch.

A group of veterans already sued, saying Trump didn’t obtain the required congressional approval under the Commemorative Works Act of 1986, which was passed specifically to preserve the integrity of the Miller plan.

Trump’s predictable legal response was to argue that the plaintiffs have not suffered any harm because he has not yet built the arch.

The notion that plaintiffs must wait until Trump builds the arch to sue over it flies in the face of the argument the administration is currently making to let Trump keep building his ballroom. There, he just argued that it wasn’t fair to try to stop him now that he’s obliterated the East Wing and started construction because the plaintiffs had “a great deal of time for them to object, long before the start of construction.”

Got it. So you can’t sue before construction starts, and you can’t sue after it starts.

And as far as congressional authorization? Per Trump, Congress already authorized it when it approved a design set out in a report from the Arlington Memorial Bridge Commission back in 1925, and Congress gave that commission the authority to change the design.

So, Trump’s atrocious arch is just a little design revision, no biggie, and also now he doesn’t have to follow the Commemorative Works Act at all. Except that the bridge was finished in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt abolished the commission in 1933, and those congressional funds are long gone.

As the plaintiffs put it, “It borders on the absurd to suggest that a statute directing a now-dissolved commission to undertake a specific, now-completed project with a designated set of funds provides authorization for Defendants to undertake a different project—funded by private donations.”

In both the arch and ballroom cases, Trump continually shifts arguments about which government entity is building it and under what authority. In the ballroom case, the administration initially prevailed by saying that no federal agency was responsible for the ballroom, so plaintiffs couldn’t sue under the Administrative Procedure Act.

Instead, he argued, a mishmash of federal statutes allowed him to build the ballroom without congressional approval. But when plaintiffs brought a claim that Trump was exceeding his authority under the statute, suddenly the Department of Justice floated the National Park Service—an agency!—might actually be in charge after all.

This is happening in the arch case, too. There, the administration says that the plaintiffs can’t win because the NPS is in charge, and under the APA, the plaintiffs can’t sue until the NPS takes a final, formal action.

In a really galling move, the DOJ also whined that the veterans were proceeding “upon the unfounded assumption that construction will begin without further reviews and approvals.”

Trump literally tore down the East Wing with no approvals, is insisting he gets to keep building the ballroom despite a court order, and filed a truly unhinged screed to the appellate court that honestly appears to have been partially written by Trump.

You see, the ballroom now has to be built because once it is, Trump and his family will be more secure. Therefore, the president’s safety and national security require the court to allow Trump to build a 90,000-sq.-ft. ballroom. The ballroom will now have “missile-resistant steel columns, beams, drone-proof roofing materials, and bullet, ballistic, and blast-proof glass windows.” Also, bomb shelters, a hospital, and a top-secret military installation.

In both of these cases, Trump is not making any real legal argument. The DOJ is hastily and sloppily throwing together some statutes, and if he doesn’t get his way, he’ll go to the Supreme Court.

Of course, for both the ballroom and the arch, Trump could build them if he got congressional approval, a thing he refuses to seek. But since Congress is essentially a dead letter, we have to look to the six conservatives on the Supreme Court, who have given Trump nearly everything he wants, to save us from Trump turning Washington, D.C., into tacky, gold monuments to his ego. That’s a pretty slender reed to cling to, but it’s what we’ve got.

Published with permission of Daily Kos