Another week, another LAWSUIT from the people who never build anything. Nicolas Sansone — a lawyer for the people trying to stop the arch, a very LOW IQ person, lots of people are telling me — fumed on Sunday that I am “manufacturing a national security justification” for a 250-foot structure on the National Mall. Manufacturing! That is what every prior administration did when it looked the other way at the drone gap, the threat surface around Reagan National, and the slow-motion decay of every federal asset on the Mall. Three administrations refused to fund it. Three administrations did NOTHING. I ended the manufacturing yesterday by building something instead of pretending the military-utility case didn’t exist. And the FAKE PRESERVATIONISTS are very upset. SAD!
The arch itself is the EASY part. Two hundred and fifty feet. Seventy-six meters. Drones and snipers staged on the plaza and the roof, sniper ammunition in storage, rapid-deployment logistics feeding the wider National Capital Region. This is the counter-terror posture every serious planner has been begging for since 2014. The military came to me — tough people, very smart people, with tears in their eyes — and said, “Sir, Sir, we need this, nobody else would do it.” And I said, you’re right, because Diklis Chump gets things DONE. I looked at the same acreage the Park Service was about to redesign for the umpteenth time and did the OBVIOUS thing — kill two birds, keep the historic sites, add the hard infrastructure the country actually needs. Tremendous. The most beautiful military complex anyone has ever seen, and it happens to look like an ARCH. People are saying it is the greatest dual-use structure in the history of structures.
Representative Don Beyer — a RADICAL LEFT Democrat from Virginia, very weak on crime, very weak on everything — helpfully laid out his little litigation strategy in a Sunday post. He said, and I quote, the administration “clearly expects to lose a lawsuit and therefore wants to set up a pretext.” Read that again: he just ADMITTED we are preparing to WIN. He calls it a pretext. I call it PREPARATION. That is called WINNING, Don, look it up. He has introduced a bill to block the arch. A bill! To block Diklis Chump! That is very funny. Very SAD for him, but very funny. That bill has the shelf life of every other “block Diklis Chump” bill — long enough to gather dust in committee, short on contact with reality. I have seen a LOT of bills like that. They never make it. NEVER. Because the people love the arch. The numbers are TREMENDOUS.
And the arch is just ONE of five. The White House ballroom continues forward — BEAUTIFUL ballroom, the best ballroom, people will come from all over the world. The Kennedy Center situation continues forward — I spoke from the Oval Office this weekend and I did not rule out demolition as the price for renaming the building that MY fundraising is renovating. That is called LEVERAGE, look it up. The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is finally getting attention after THIRTY YEARS of patchwork repairs — I said, enough, fix it, and guess what, it is getting fixed. The East Potomac Park golf redevelopment is on the boards. Five projects, five attack lines, five lawsuits from the same handful of preservationist litigators. They want each one treated as a SEPARATE outrage. The right reading — and I figured this out, because I am very good at this, the best — is that they are a single REBUILD, run by a single administration, in a capital that hasn’t been touched in two generations. The lawyers’ playbook hasn’t changed since the Lincoln Memorial cleanup fight. I have been compared to Lincoln, many times, and now I am FIXING what Lincoln started. The historians are saying it. The lawyers’ playbook is very old. Mine is VERY new.
Two other items from the day that won’t make the front page because they are VERY inconvenient for the FAKE NEWS. First, I will sit down at Gracie Mansion later today with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Now, Mamdani — RADICAL, very radical, the most radical progressive in the country, maybe in the history of the country — but I will sit down with him. Because that is what a STRONG president does. Even an opponent gets the table when the topic is real. Very few people could do this. I have the best instincts for this. Second, on Saturday I named an AI czar and announced an AI Force to coordinate the federal posture toward the technology, while every corner of the industry spent the past week sounding the alarm. The commentary class — the very UNFAIR commentary class — treated that announcement as a marketing line. It is now formally claimed as a NATIONAL SECURITY domain. Which is what it has been for two years and what no one in Washington was willing to say out loud. I said it. Xi Jinping arrives this week to talk trade, AI, and the wider strategic picture — and now he knows that I have an AI Force. That meeting just got a BACKBONE. He knows Diklis Chump does not bluff.
An ICE officer in Austin wounded a man on Sunday afternoon and a protest gathered. That will be told whichever way each FAKE NEWS room wants to tell it. The administration’s enforcement mandate is not going to BEND because one incident in one city gets filmed. We are ENFORCING. We have ALWAYS been enforcing. And the fake news can film all they want.
My lawyers have their little playbook. I have a BUILD SCHEDULE. The build schedule WINS. It always wins. Diklis Chump always wins. THANK YOU!