The next No Kings Day is coming
The next No Kings Day will be different. Join the No Kings kickoff call this Thursday, 9/10 at 8pm ET/5pm PT to learn about the national day of voter participation being planned for this October.
📢 Tyranny Tuesday, September 15, 2026 🚨
SAURON BUILT A DARK TOWER🗼 NOW TRUMP WANTS ONE TOO 👁️
One Arch to Rule Them All — And Your Tax Dollars to Bind It 💸
🏛️ He’s Building a Monument to Himself – We’re Building a Movement to Stop Him.
Even Sauron only needed one tower. 🗼 Trump wants an arch, a ballroom, a helipad, a renamed Kennedy arts center, and 250 statues of his favorite Americans and he wants the rest of us to pay for it. 💸 While American troops remain locked in an open-ended war with Iran ⚔️ and families across this country skip meals 🍽️ and go without healthcare 🏥, President Trump is spending his days doing something else entirely: picking out marble. It might be fun for him. It is not fun for us. And it is not free. 💰
🗼 THE ARCH: A 250-Foot Monument to Vanity
Trump wants to erect a 250-foot triumphal arch bigger than the Arc de Triomphe, more than twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial directly across the Potomac at the gateway to Arlington National Cemetery ⚰️. Critics have simply started calling it the “Arc de Trump.”
He is trying to break ground ⛏️ before any historic or environmental review is complete, and without congressional approval which the law requires.
🚩 He is not the only one who’s noticed the problem:
• ⚔️ Three Vietnam War veterans Michael Lemmon, Shaun Byrnes, and Jon Gundersen joined by retired architectural historian Calder Loth, have sued the administration with the help of the watchdog group Public Citizen. Their complaint calls the arch a “vanity project” that would permanently wreck the sacred, century-old sightline between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery the same view generations of grieving families have walked to honor the dead.
• ⚖️ A second lawsuit from the Preservation League and Cultural Heritage Partners is demanding the legally required review process actually happen before excavation begins.
• 🎖️ VoteVets, a progressive veteran’s organization, is standing behind the lawsuit too; retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton called the arch nothing short of a sacrilege on ground meant to honor the fallen, not one man’s ego.
• 📊 The public agrees: in a recent Economist/YouGov poll, only 21% of Americans support the arch, while 52% oppose it.
None of that has stopped Trump. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has announced excavation will begin regardless. 🚧
🏗️ IT’S NOT JUST THE ARCH
The arch is only the latest entry in a running list of presidential vanity projects billed, one way or another, to the American public and its institutions:
• 🎪 The White House Ballroom a $400–500 million, 90,000-square-foot addition bigger than the White House residence itself.
• 🛜 The illegal demolition of the White House East Wing bulldozed without congressional approval, without warning, and after Trump had explicitly promised the historic structure would be left untouched. The Jacqueline Kennedy Garden and its historic trees were destroyed along with it.
• 🎭 Renaming the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after himself, pushed through by a board he stacked with loyalists — who also quietly removed a beloved public sculpture, “Blue,” from the grounds.
• 🗿 A proposed “National Garden of American Heroes” featuring 250 statues and an amphitheater along the Potomac.
• 💦 The botched Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation, where new coating peeled almost immediately; a failure Trump blamed on unnamed “vandals” rather than his own rush job.
• 🚁 A new White House helipad, built the same way, no review, no oversight.
• ✨ Assorted interior makeovers, including gold ornamentation reportedly super-glued directly onto White House walls and the Oval Office mantle.
💵 The estimated price tag for all of it: as much as $1 billion, according to New York Times reporting with related contracts for the ballroom, security complex, helipad, and Lafayette Square work alone totaling at least $927 million, per documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
📉 Nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of these projects, according to a Washington Post/Ipsos poll.
Asked why any of it matters to him this much, Trump told New York Magazine the quiet part out loud: “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.” 👑
💣 MEANWHILE, REAL AMERICANS ARE PAYING FOR HIS WAR
As Trump plays architect 📐, the war with Iran grinds on and it is not cheap. Independent trackers estimate the conflict has already cost taxpayers well over $10–25 billion in its opening weeks alone, with daily operational costs estimated at roughly $59 million a day. The Pentagon is reportedly seeking a supplemental request as high as $200 billion to keep it going on top of a defense budget that already topped $1 trillion for the first time since World War II. 🪖
At the very same time, last year’s federal budget bill made deep cuts to Medicaid 🏥 and SNAP 🥫 leaving millions of Americans at risk of losing health insurance and food assistance.
Let that sink in: one single day of war funding could cover Medicaid for millions of families. Instead, it’s funding airstrikes abroad while a marble arch rises at home. 🏛️
⚔️ Guns and gold trim for him. Austerity for everyone else. 📉
✊ THIS IS WHAT TYRANNY TUESDAY IS FOR
INNV is a grassroots, non-partisan organization standing up for government accountability and for the servicemembers and veterans 🎖️ this administration claims to honor while bulldozing the very ground they’re buried beneath.
We are asking for the law to matter. ⚖️ We are demanding that Senator Jacky Rosen and Senator Catherine Cortez Masto stand up for the American taxpayer and push back against one man’s ego — to decide what gets built on our National Mall, Congress must act, not cower. We are asking for a government that feeds 🍞 its people before it gilds its ballrooms. ✨
📣 JOIN US. BRING A SIGN. BRING A FRIEND. SHOW UP. 📣
Sources: The New York Times (“As War Grinds On, Trump Relishes Renovation Projects,” Sept. 7, 2026); The Washington Post; Forbes; NPR; PBS NewsHour; Bloomberg Government; National Priorities Project; Center for American Progress.
✊ JOIN US
📅 Date: September 15, 2026
🕙 Time: 10:00–11:00
📍 Location: Bruce R. Thompson Courthouse and Federal Building, 400 S. Virginia St., Reno, NV, 89501 Register Here: ✊
🦺 PLEASE NOTE: INNV supports non-violent participation in civic events. By registering and attending this event, attendees take full responsibility for keeping themselves safe by following instructions from Marshals, staying within the boundaries of the event, and de-escalating situations if you are confronted.