Trump wants snipers on top of his Triumphal Arch. Chef José Andrés shows how this would look.

Today Trump, who seems to be auditioning for a post-presidential career as a satirical writer for The Onion, said that he wants the Triumphal Arch he seeks to build in Washington D.C. to have some special features. The New York Times describes them.

President Trump said on Sunday his planned 250-foot triumphal arch in Washington would be built to host “large numbers of drones,” snipers and ammunition, as the administration appeared prepared to justify another construction project by citing national security.

Mr. Trump said the arch would be “a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.” The proposal would appear to place an arsenal and military staging ground in the center of the nation’s capital.

“There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World,” Mr. Trump said in a social media post.

That’s because no other country has an egotistical idiot as their leader. The only valid response to having drones, snipers, and sniper ammunition somehow built into the Triumphal Arch, serving no discernible purpose, is ridicule.

Which is what Chef José Andrés did in a post on X that I came across this morning. (Andrés is the founder of World Central Kitchen, a charitable organization that feeds needy people around the world).

Since some of the humorous details in the AI image above are hard to make out, here’s a larger version. Beautifully done, Chef Andrés.

This is Trump’s Truth Social post where he announced the sniper scheme. We really do have an unwell president. If any other 80 year old man came up with a notion this crazy and wanted us to take it seriously, his family would want him screened for dementia.

Naturally Trump lied in his post. A Salon story says:

But the post raises questions about both the history of the project and its newly announced military purpose.

The Pentagon has not publicly identified which part of the military requested the conversion or what security threat the facility would address. A military official said the Defense Department had nothing to add beyond Trump’s post. Retired Marine Col. Mark Cancian also questioned the need for such a facility when the active Army installation Fort Myer sits roughly a mile away.

Trump’s claim that the arch has been “planned since the Civil War Era” also oversimplifies a complicated history. Plans for a Potomac crossing date to before the Civil War, and various monumental arches were proposed in Washington during the late 19th century. But the plan Congress approved in 1925 for Arlington Memorial Bridge called for two 166-foot columns near what is now Memorial Circle, not Trump’s triumphal arch. Those columns were never built.

The claim involving “59 top cities and Capitals” is similarly unclear. Trump did not identify the 59 cities or the source of the comparison. GlobalSecurity.org examined a similar claim Trump made earlier this year and found that, among the world’s 65 largest metropolitan areas, only eight had what it classified as significant triumphal or memorial arches. Fifty-seven, including Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow and Los Angeles, did not.