The monument would darken the nation’s premier military burial ground early in the morning on more than 280 days a year, a Post analysis finds.
October 27, 2026 at 5:00 a.m. EDTToday at 5:00 a.m. EDT
Washington’s monumental core is a study in careful geometry and deliberate sight lines. From the Lincoln Memorial, past a bridge over the Potomac River, Arlington National Cemetery occupies the rising ground in the distance.
President Donald Trump’s proposed 250-foot-tall arch would be a towering new presence in this space. To understand its impact, The Washington Post built a to-scale digital 3D model.
Over the course of a year, the shadow of the triumphal arch would touch burial sites in Arlington National Cemetery on 284 days, The Post found. It would briefly cover Kennedy’s eternal flame on 18 days, and it would shade the former president’s memorial on 50. It would darken the Military Women’s Memorial on 109 days.
The shadow would move across the graves of veterans and their next of kin from the Vietnam War, Korean War, World War II, World War I, Spanish-American War and Civil War, the model shows. It would dim the headstones of formerly enslaved people. In total, The Post found that it would pass over more than 75,000 graves.
On most days, by the time the cemetery opens at 8 a.m., the shadow would recede from the grounds. It would linger past that time on 26 days, the model shows.
Told of The Post’s findings, White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in an email that the arch would “enhance the visitor experience” at the cemetery. “The Triumphal Arch in Memorial Circle is going to be one of the most iconic landmarks not only in Washington, D.C., but throughout the world,” he said.
The Interior Department said in a statement that the arch’s designers ran models and found that only a small section of the cemetery would be affected after its opening — for less than two weeks out of the year. “That period is less than an hour after sunrise, at which point shadows are very lengthened and distorted, and are mingled with the long shadows of trees,” the department said.
Asked for copies of the two analyses Interior said it conducted, the agency provided 23 pages of visual simulations. The documents show the shadow on a limited number of days and hours — almost all after the cemetery opened — and do not explain the methodologies used. The locations of the shadows in those simulations largely aligned with the locations of shadows in The Post’s analysis.
The arch’s immense size and its proposed location, about a quarter-mile from the cemetery, have troubled historians, preservationists and architects who say it would disrupt the careful composition that has shaped the nation’s capital city for generations.
“The original designers understood that the open space between significant structures was as important as the landmarks themselves,” said Neil Flanagan, an architect and historian who is writing a book about Washington’s design.
City planners, such as an influential 1902 panel known as the McMillan Commission, worked to set each distinct project “as a jewel” within Washington’s boundaries, helping give the capital its unique character, Flanagan said.
A towering arch sited between the Lincoln Memorial and military cemetery does not fit that vision, he said.
Micki McElya, a history professor at the University of Connecticut, said the symbolism of having Trump’s arch cast shadows on the military cemetery was “undeniable” and uncomfortable, even if the effects were visible only briefly after the cemetery opens.
“It’s not about people in the cemetery seeing shadows so much as it is about the fact of the shadows themselves,” said McElya, whose 2017 book about Arlington National Cemetery was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
At sunset, the arch’s shadow on many days would extend across the congested Arlington Memorial Bridge and reach monuments to the east, The Post’s analysis found. While the arch’s morning shadow would fall on Kennedy’s grave site during spring and summer, its evening shadow would cut across Abraham Lincoln’s memorial in the fall and winter. On 110 days a year, the shadow would touch one of the monuments to the assassinated presidents.
Parts of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial would be shadowed by the arch on more than 30 days, along with the Reflecting Pool where he gave his most famous speech. The arch’s sunset shadow would also, at times, fall across the memorials for veterans of the Vietnam and Korean wars.
To give the clearest picture of the shadow cast by the arch, shadows from the trees and other structures are not included in the to-scale depiction below.
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Jan. 15, 5:55 p.m.
Reflecting Pool
Oct. 23, 7:04 p.m.
Lincoln Memorial
Nov. 7, 6:43 p.m.
Korean War Veterans Memorial
Oct. 9, 7:22 p.m.
MLK Memorial
March 20, 8:06 p.m.
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Jan. 15, 5:55 p.m.
Lincoln Memorial Nov. 7, 6:43 p.m.
Reflecting Pool
Oct. 23, 7:04 p.m.
Korean War Veterans Memorial
Oct. 9, 7:22 p.m.
MLK Memorial March 20, 8:06 p.m.
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Jan. 15, 4:55 p.m.
Lincoln Memorial Nov. 7, 4:43 p.m.
Reflecting Pool Oct. 23, 6:04 p.m.
Korean War Veterans Memorial Oct. 9, 6:22 p.m.
MLK Memorial March 20, 7:06 p.m.
The idea that the monument would cast a shadow on the resting places of veterans, politicians and other prominent American figures is “a sacrilege,” said Paul Eaton, a retired U.S. Army major general whose parents are buried in the cemetery.
Eaton works with VoteVets, an advocacy organization for military veterans that has opposed Trump’s project. The group raised concerns about the shadow to The Post after it conducted an analysis using artificial intelligence. The Post then carried out its own examination using the 3D model, which draws on extensive real-world data and rigorous calculations.
“There are a lot of families out there who are going to visit their loved one and just be overwhelmed by the shadow of this vanity project to Trump,” he said, alluding to Trump’s comment last year that he was building the monument to honor his presidency.
Karla Rothstein, the director of DeathLab at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation — where she teaches on how urban public spaces can honor the dead — wrote in an email that shadows “are not inherently negative” but that “their source matters both experientially and politically.”
“Perhaps the concern is not so much the presence of shade as what it means for a monument celebrating triumph to impose its shadow on a landscape commemorating sacrifice,” Rothstein said.
Flowers are laid at an Air Force veteran’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery on July 4. (Christine Kao/The Washington Post)
Trump has been unmoved by complaints about the arch’s size, location and design. His administration is fighting a lawsuit filed by three Vietnam War veterans and a historic preservationist who contend that the arch would harm their experience of visiting the military cemetery and have asked for an emergency halt to the project. A federal judge is weighing the case.
Trump’s deputies are also pushing to relax a federal law that restricts most construction in Washington to a maximum height of 130 feet, which could ease the approval process for the arch and help strengthen the administration’s legal case for the project.
The president has said the arch should be larger than the Arc de Triomphe, the 164-foot-tall monument in Paris that helped inspire his project.
“I didn’t want to have it smaller. I had to have it a little bit larger,” Trump said this month at the White House.
The National Capital Planning Commission, a federal review panel that Trump has stocked with allies, is expected to approve the project as soon as Nov. 5. Administration officials plan to break ground immediately afterward.
The shadow would affect the cemetery while it is open far more often if Trump gets his wish for year-round daylight saving time, which would shift clocks forward one hour in the winter.
Eaton and others said they were particularly unhappy to learn about how the arch could shade Kennedy’s memorial, including the eternal flame that commemorates his burial site.
Jacqueline Kennedy, the president’s widow, had sought — and been promised — that her husband’s grave would be visible around Washington, according to presidential historians. In an interview with journalist Theodore H. White one week after her husband’s assassination, she reflected on the significance of his burial site and the meaning of the views to her daughter, Caroline.
The eternal flame burns in Arlington in 2013, on the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s death. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
“I care about that flame,” Jacqueline Kennedy said at the time. “Sometimes you drive across that bridge and see that Lee mansion all lit up. That’s one of the first things Caroline learned to recognize. I wanted that flame.”
The administration is set to put its own eternal flame atop Trump’s arch, according to final plans released two weeks ago. According to The Post’s analysis, that means that on some days — such as July 28, Jacqueline Kennedy’s birthday — that flame would be visible even as Trump’s arch casts shadows over Kennedy’s own flame and grave.
Methodology
To create the 3D model used in this analysis, The Post drew on triumphal arch plans submitted by the Trump administration to the National Capital Planning Commission. We used U.S. Geological Survey lidar data to model terrain and other features at Arlington National Cemetery and the surrounding area. We constructed the model in QGIS and imported it into Blender, which allowed us to use data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to simulate the sun’s position on each day of the year. To verify the accuracy of the model, we tested the resulting shadow against satellite images of real-world shadows from nearby landmarks such as the Washington Monument. When identifying parts of the cemetery that would be impacted by the arch’s shadow, we did not take into account shade from trees. The absence of tree shadows allowed us to more clearly see the borders of the arch shadow and identify areas it fell on. Additionally, although we did depict tree shadows in the May 12 visualization, such shadows are seasonal and dappled, and so any representation is imperfect. To count the total number of graves darkened by the shadow, we mapped its path across the cemetery and identified the sections it would cover. We used data from the Arlington National Cemetery Explorer to learn how many graves are in each of those sections.
About this story
Editing by Nadine Ajaka, Maureen Linke and Eric Rich. Video editing by Peter Stevenson. Copy editing by Alli Hausman. Video by Luis Velarde for The Washington Post.