President Donald Trump wants to build a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch in his own honor that would eclipse the historic view that exists at Arlington Cemetery, where more than 400,000 of America’s veterans are buried. Now that Vietnam War veterans are suing the White House over his latest self-honoring construction project, one of them is warning the Supreme Court that capitulating to Trump would further enable him to become an authoritarian.
“What do you want the Supreme Court to know about your service and the president’s authority?” MS NOW’s Katy Tur asked Vietnam War veteran Jon Gundersen on Tuesday.
“We all did our job,” Gundersen told Tur. “I don’t think we were heroes or anything. We volunteered. I went in in ’66 as did my fellow veterans. By the way, my two plaintiffs, we served behind the Iron Curtain. I’ve served six Republicans, six Democratic presidents. We know behind the Iron Curtain what an authoritarian regime is like without the rule of law, without due process. We want to prevent that.”
He added, “I think the Supreme Court, with any knowledge of the history of this, will support us. Every monument in Washington, from Lincoln to Washington to World War II, has passed through Congress, has been appropriated. This is the first time that we get a little tweet from the Secretary of the Interior saying, ‘We’re gonna do this.’ That ain’t the way to run a railroad.”
Arlington Cemetery, which was built on the former estate of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and designed to have a direct line of sight to Union President Abraham Lincoln, would have that famous view ruined by Trump’s proposed arch. Even though Trump does not have federal permission to break ground to build the arch, he is proceeding to do so anyway.
“If you’ve been to Arlington and you’ve been to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier or the Kennedy Grave, as noted, you’ve got this sweeping view of Washington,” Gundersen explained to Tur. “You’ve got the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Memorial, the Vietnam, Korea, and that view would be interrupted by this gigantic arch three times the size of the Washington Monument, gilded arch. And this view had been built and the Arlington was a sign of reconciliation between north and south and the Lincoln Memorial. And now you have arch that has gone through no process to the ego of one man and not to those who served and sacrificed. So we had a lawsuit, my fellow veterans, Mike Lemon and Sean Behrens and I, to stop the arch and have a real discussion of what is the best way to honor veterans.”
When Tur asked Gundersen about the best way to honor veterans, he said “it’s to do something that talks about their sacrifice to the country. I’ll give you an example. The Vietnam Memorial, it was very controversial when it was built, and there was a lot of controversy and discussion. Now it is one of the most visited sites in Washington. One of the reasons why, because it honors the simple soldier. There’s no general on horseback. There’s certainly no president there. Everybody is an equal in the eyes of their faith. And that’s a good way of honoring veterans.”
It is unclear whether the Supreme Court will support Gundersen’s lawsuit. When allowing Trump to construct his White House ballroom despite him doing so illegally — both by defying the traditional permit process, not receiving congressional authorization and disregarding lower courts which barred him from doing so — the Supreme Court’s Republican majority tried to thread the needle between admitting Trump probably broke the law but allowing their fellow Republican to proceed anyway. To do this, they argued the organization entrusted with protecting historic buildings, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, lacked standing to sue Trump, and it is conceivable they could use a similar claim to stop Gundersen and his fellow veterans from stopping Trump, who likewise does not have legal permission to build the arch.
When describing the Supreme Court in August after it allowed Trump to continue implementing a mail-in voting suppression scheme that lower courts unanimously found violated the Constitution (which clearly delegates control of elections to the states), former top Justice Department official Pam Karlan said that “it’s amazing the stuff they’ll say. I don’t know if you’ve taken a look at the Postal Service’s 95-page explanation of its final order, but there’s this moment in there where they say, ‘Well, of course we can tell you how to do your ballot envelopes, because we’ve got this stuff that tells people how to send human remains through the mail.’ Which is crazy talk.”
https://youtu.be/9TVP08SEPeY