Donald Trump used a year-end White House reception to tout an ambitious plan for a giant triumphal arch in Washington DC, assigning Domestic Policy Council chief Vince Haley to make the monument his top priority and promising it would eclipse Paris’s Arc de Triomphe in scale and grandeur. The proposal, floated as Americans struggle with rising living costs and as a controversial White House ballroom project faces a preservation lawsuit, has drawn criticism at home and abroad, especially after Trump disparaged France and the broader European continent as having little more than "history" to offer.