They’re Putting Snipers On The Arch

A 250-foot monument to one man. Drones inside. Ammunition in storage. Now ask yourself what it’s actually for.

They’re Putting Snipers On The Arch

A 250-foot monument to one man. Drones inside. Ammunition in storage. Now ask yourself what it’s actually for.

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,029: Sunday, September 20th, 2026

There’s a rule I learned back when I was writing ads for my business over a three-decade period:

Nobody ever tells you the truth in the headline.

They tell you the truth in the throwaway line. The aside. The part they figure you’ll skim past because you’re already sold…or already numb.

On Sunday morning, the President of the United States posted the throwaway line of the decade.

He announced that the giant triumphal arch he wants to plant at the foot of Arlington National Cemetery…the one modeled on the Arc de Triomphe…the one with the golden statues…the one supposedly honoring America’s 250th birthday… is being converted.

Into what?

Into a “top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch.”

A structure built to house drones. To position snipers on the roof and on the plaza. To store, in his words, large quantities of sniper ammunition.

And why?

Because of the “strong request” of the United States military, he says. For national security.

Read that again. Slowly. Because…I want you to notice what’s missing.

What Isn’t There Is Everything

He didn’t name a branch. He didn’t name a commander. He didn’t name a threat, an incident, a study, a date, or a briefing.

He didn’t name anything at all.

When Reuters asked the White House and the Department of Defense to confirm that the military made this request…neither one answered.

Meanwhile, the public planning documents…the ones that actually went through review…describe a granite monument. A welcome. Something for visitors to walk under at Memorial Circle.

There is not one syllable in them about drones. Not one about ammunition. Not one about snipers.

The Federal Aviation Administration cleared the thing just last week. They said a 250-foot tower wouldn’t endanger aircraft on approach to Reagan National…provided it carried an eternal flame on top so pilots could see it.

An eternal flame. That was the design as of Tuesday.

By Sunday it’s an armory with…a pilot light.

So…let me say the obvious thing out loud, because apparently somebody has to:

When a man tells you the generals begged him to do something, and he cannot produce one single general who did the begging…the request did not come from the generals.

It came from him.

Understand What An Arch Actually Is

I want to be precise here, because this part gets waved off as an aesthetic argument. It isn’t.

A triumphal arch is not a memorial. A memorial honors the dead. An arch honors the winner.

Rome invented the form. A victorious general came home…and the Senate built him a permanent stone advertisement so that every citizen…walking to the market…would pass underneath his name for the rest of their lives.

Napoleon revived it for exactly the same reason. That’s the entire function. It’s a billboard you can’t scroll past…made of rock…aimed at your grandchildren.

Fine. Vanity is ancient. Vanity is survivable. The republic can live with an ugly… expensive monument…to a man who thinks a great deal of himself.

But…a triumphal arch…with firing positions on it…is a different animal entirely.

Look at where this goes. Memorial Circle, the Virginia end of Arlington Memorial Bridge… one of a small handful of crossings between the capital and northern Virginia…a corridor tens of thousands of people move through. A clean sightline to the Lincoln Memorial. A clean line straight down the National Mall.

Ask yourself, seriously, what a sniper position there accomplishes.

It does not defend America from China. It does not stop a submarine…intercept a missile…or harden a single piece of critical infrastructure.

What it overlooks is a bridge, a traffic circle, and the front door of the National Mall.

Those are the places where Americans walk. Where Americans gather. Where Americans march…when they are furious with their own government…which, if you know the ground at all, is precisely what that stretch of grass has been used for since 1963 and long before.

I am not telling you the man intends to shoot anybody.

I am telling you what the building is shaped like.

And…I’m telling you that free countries do not build permanent overwatch positions aimed at the places where their own citizens assemble. They just don’t. That isn’t a monument with extra features. That’s a guard tower with a gift shop.

“Security” Is The Master Key

Watch the word. It opens every lock in this administration, every single time, and it never has to show its work.

The entire East Wing of the White House…where first ladies kept offices for over a century…was reduced to rubble to make room for a $300 million ballroom. Demolition started before the agencies with jurisdiction had approved anything. The explanation offered? The East Wing needed modernizing for security and technology.

Security.

Troops deployed into American cities for a year and a half now. The projected bill runs past $1.7 billion by the end of this year…and the most comprehensive analysis available finds no measurable effect on violent crime…homicide…or gun violence. In Washington, Guard members are still walking metro stations…parks…and tourist sites.

Security.

And…when federal courts asked whether any of this was lawful, the Solicitor General told the Supreme Court that the President’s power to deploy troops domestically is “not judicially reviewable at all.”

Not reviewable. Not by a judge. Certainly not by you.

A federal judge found the Los Angeles deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act. The last federal troops left that city in December under an order describing the occupation as “profoundly un-American.”

The courts held. Barely, late, and at enormous cost…but they held. And…every time they held…he came back with the same word.

Security.

Now: an arch. With snipers. At Arlington.

Look At The Calendar

Here’s the part that ought to keep you up.

The FAA cleared the arch last week. Interior announced excavation would begin. One day later…three Vietnam veterans and an architectural historian…represented in federal court…arguing he bypassed the congressional approval this kind of structure requires…filed for a restraining order to stop him.

And…then, on a Sunday morning…TODAY…with the litigation closing in…the arch suddenly became a military facility at the military’s urgent request.

Think about what that reclassification does inside a courtroom. “National security” is the one phrase in American law that makes judges cautious…makes documents classified…and makes discovery disappear.

A visitor attraction gets scrutinized by preservation boards and planning commissions. A defense installation does not.

That’s not a design revision. That may well be a legal shield…welded on in a hurry.

It almost certainly…IS.

The Arithmetic Of An Old Man

And underneath all of it is the thing nobody says directly, so I will.

He turned 80 in June. His term ends in January 2029. Whatever gets floated on podcasts…he cannot run again.

A man in that position is doing arithmetic every single morning. He is counting what’s left.

Understand what monument-building is. It’s what you reach for when there is nothing new left to win.

Polls expire. Crowds thin out. Cabinet secretaries resign and publish memoirs. Allies get indicted. But granite? Granite sits there for four centuries telling your version of the story to people who will never meet you and cannot argue back.

He has framed the arch as a patriotic landmark honoring American history and military service. But…nations don’t get Arcs de Triomphe handed to them by one man. They vote for them…through a legislature…after a war they actually won.

Instead…we have veterans in federal court trying to stop a war memorial, because it would blot out the historic sightline between Arlington House and the Lincoln Memorial.

Sit with that sentence. Veterans. Suing. To stop. A war memorial.

So here’s the reading I can’t shake, and I would genuinely love for somebody to talk me out of it:

The arch is the legacy. The garrison is the insurance.

One is for after he’s gone. The other is for the time he has left.

He is carving himself a permanent place in the skyline of the capital…and arming it. On the ground where this country buries its dead. Directly facing the memorial to the president who actually held the nation together.

If you don’t feel the cold coming off that…I don’t know what else to show you.

Potential Reader Questions

I’m going to answer the hard ones straight, including the ones where the honest answer is “I don’t know.”

“Do you actually believe he’s going to order soldiers to shoot American civilians?”

No. I don’t believe there is a plan sitting in a drawer to fire on a crowd…and I’m not going to pretend otherwise to get you to share this post.

But…I think that’s the wrong question…and…I think asking it that way is how people talk themselves into calm.

Nobody planned Kent State. There was no order. There were nervous young men in uniform…a hostile crowd…live ammunition…thirteen seconds…and four dead students. It took a governor’s decision to put armed soldiers and angry citizens on the same patch of grass…and after that it took nothing at all.

The danger was never a written order. The danger is proximity. It’s the standing arrangement; troops here…protesters there…rifles in between…repeated often enough… that the odds catch up. You don’t need malice. You need a bad night.

So…no…I don’t think he’s planning a massacre. I think he’s building the conditions under which one becomes possible…and calling it a monument.

“You’re being hysterical. Snipers on rooftops are standard security. This is nothing.”

That’s the strongest argument against me…and I’m not going to duck it.

It’s true. The Secret Service puts counter-sniper teams on the White House roof. They do it at inaugurations…at state funerals…at the Super Bowl.

Counter-drone capability at a sensitive federal site in 2026 is not sinister…it’s overdue. If somebody had quietly hardened Memorial Circle as part of a normal security review…I would not have written a word.

Three things make this different.

It’s permanent. Temporary overwatch for an event is a posture. A purpose-built structure with ammunition storage is infrastructure. Postures end. Buildings don’t.

Nobody asked for it on the record. Not a branch…not a commander…not a threat assessment. The Pentagon didn’t confirm it when Reuters asked. When a genuine security requirement exists…somebody in a uniform will say so.

And it arrived on a Sunday morning…days after a federal judge was asked to stop the project.

Any one of those alone…I shrug. All three together…I write.

“Will he actually leave office in January 2029?”

Here’s everything I can tell you honestly.

The 22nd Amendment is one sentence and it is not ambiguous: no person shall be elected president more than twice. He’s been elected twice.

He has talked about it both ways. In 2025 he told NBC News there were “methods” and that he was not joking. His organization sold Trump 2028 hats.

More recently…he’s waved it off…telling reporters he’d love to run but “the law is very strong.” The most-discussed workaround…running as vice president…is closed by the 12th Amendment…which bars anyone ineligible for the presidency from the vice presidency. Constitutional scholars are close to unanimous on that.

My honest read: I don’t expect a man to barricade himself in the Oval Office. That’s a movie. Could I be wrong? Without question. We’ll find out together whether he does…or doesn’t.

What I expect is uglier and more boring. I expect a contested framework. An argument that some election…somewhere…was so corrupted…that the normal rules can’t apply. A friendly legal theory…a compliant committee…a delay…an emergency. Not a coup; a paperwork crisis…that never quite resolves.

And…I’d point you to something that got very little attention: lawyers who served under both Bush and Obama…warned that this administration might challenge midterm results it didn’t like. Watch what happens this November. That’s the dress rehearsal…and it’s six weeks out.

“Then isn’t the arch a distraction from the real threat?”

The real thing to watch is the Insurrection Act of 1807. It’s the statute that lets a president use the military for domestic law enforcement…and it’s the one door that hasn’t been opened.

He has walked up to it…repeatedly. Over Portland. Over Chicago. Over Minneapolis in January…where he said plainly that if he had to enact it…he’d do it. As of this writing…he hasn’t formally pulled the trigger. The last president who did was George H.W. Bush in 1992.

The arch isn’t a distraction from that. It’s the same project in granite. One is a legal authority he wants. The other is a physical position he’s building. They point the same direction.

“Should I buy a gun?”

First, I should tell you that I own several guns, and have always owned at least two…since I was 12 years old. It’s mostly a regional, cultural…rural thing. When you grow up where food is literally put on tables by hunting…many people are born into having a firearm around just as assuredly as they find a house with a warm coat for winter.

I just wanted to get that out there…before answering the question.

”Should I buy a gun?” No. Absolutely not; not as a response to Trump’s Sunday morning B.S….and I want to be blunt about why.

Every armed civilian who shows up to a demonstration hands them the photograph they need. The entire rhetorical project of the last two years has been to relabel protesters as insurrectionists…because “insurrectionist” is the magic word that unlocks the statute. Do not dress the part. Do not become the justification.

If you take one thing from this letter: the response to a militarized government is not a militarized citizenry. It’s courts…cameras…lawyers…elections…and enormous numbers of visibly peaceful people. That combination has beaten this administration in court repeatedly. Armed standoffs have never beaten anything.

“The courts keep ruling against him. Doesn’t that prove the system works?”

Partly…yes…and I said so above. Judges found the Los Angeles deployment unlawful. The Supreme Court declined to green-light Chicago. Troops came home. The system has bent without snapping.

But…look at what winning cost. Months of occupation before relief arrived. Hundreds of millions spent. And…an administration that responded by telling the Supreme Court…its deployment power isn’t reviewable by any court at all.

A system that works only after eighteen months and a Supreme Court appeal…is a system running on its reserve tank. Don’t mistake survival…for health.

“Would the military even follow an order like that?”

This is the real firewall…and it’s the thing I take genuine comfort in.

American officers swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a man. They are trained…explicitly…repeatedly… that unlawful orders must be refused…and firing on peaceful citizens is about as clearly unlawful as it gets. Retired generals have been saying this out loud for a year.

The concern isn’t the colonel. The concern is the attrition. Replace enough senior officers with people chosen for loyalty…and you don’t need to break the oath…you just need to wait out the people who’d honor it.

“I’ve got kids. What do I tell them?”

Tell them the truth…in a size they can carry.

Tell them this country has an argument about power that never really ends…and…that right now it’s loud. Tell them…that people before us won that argument in courtrooms and at ballot boxes…and by standing in the street without throwing anything.

Then…let them see you do one of those things.

They won’t remember what you said about the arch. They’ll remember whether you were afraid…and if you were…what you did…anyway.

So What Do You Actually Do

Don’t doomscroll. Doomscrolling is a hobby, not a response.

Make it cost him something.

This project still needs approvals…the National Capital Planning Commission…the Commission of Fine Arts, the FAA. Those bodies take public comment on the record. So comment. Bureaucratic friction is unglamorous…AND…it is the single thing that has slowed him down most.

Fund the lawyers.

The veterans’ case is live in federal district court right now. Courts have been the only institution that has actually stopped any of this.

Make your representative say the words.

Not a statement. Not a post. On the record, out loud: do you support storing ammunition and positioning snipers at Arlington National Cemetery? Make them answer in a sentence a voter can repeat.

And…above everything else…don’t get used to it.

That’s the entire game. It always was. They don’t need your approval. They need your shrug.

DO. NOT. GIVE. IT. TO. THEM.

#HoldFast

Back soon.

-Jack

Jack Hopkins

P.S. Notice that no renderings of the militarized version have been released. None. We are being told a 250-foot granite arch at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery will simultaneously function as a drone bay…a sniper platform…and an ammunition depot…and there is not a single drawing of what that looks like.

Either the design doesn’t exist yet…in which case the “strong request” is a story told on a Sunday morning…or…it does exist…and they’d rather you not see it. There is no third option. Ask for the renderings. Keep asking. The answer to that one question tells you everything.

P.P.S. One last thing…and I’ll let you go. He wrote that there will be no facility like this anywhere in the world. He meant it as a boast. Take him literally instead…because he’s right.

No other democracy on earth has a fortified triumphal arch bearing one living leader’s name…stocked with ammunition…standing watch over its national cemetery.

There’s a reason for that…and…the reason isn’t that nobody thought of it. It’s that the men who did think of it weren’t running democracies…by the time the scaffolding came down.

Sources

• Trump says his planned arch would become a ‘military complex’ able to host drones and snipers — Associated Press

• Trump to use Washington triumphal arch as military complex — Reuters

• Trump says proposed triumphal arch will double as military complex — CNN

• Trump says his planned arch will now become ‘top grade military complex’ — MS NOW

• Trump says new arch will also deploy drones, position snipers and store ammo — Fox News

• Vietnam War vets sue Trump over his arch, claim he skipped congressional approval

• White House East Wing demolished as Trump moves forward with ballroom construction — Associated Press

• Trump’s Use of the National Guard in American Cities — American Oversight

• The Trump Administration’s $1.7 Billion National Guard Deployments Fail To Reduce Urban Crime — Center for American Progress

• DOJ Tells SCOTUS Trump Has Unreviewable Power to Send Troops to U.S. Cities — Democracy Docket

• National Guard deployment to DC will last through Trump’s term — CNN

• Trump won’t rule out a third term, tells NBC News ‘there are methods’

• Trump brushes off third term question: ‘The law is very strong’ — Fox News

• What is the Insurrection Act? Here’s what Trump has said about using it — PBS NewsHour

• Trump looks to invoke the Insurrection Act. What is stopping him? — New Statesman