Former President Bill Clinton spent the opening minutes of his speech Tuesday, September 22, 2026, poking fun at President Donald Trump’s plan for a triumphal arch linking Washington and Virginia — a structure the president has described as one that would also serve as a military facility. Clinton was kicking off the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting in New York.
“I suppose I could take my entire allotted time to discuss the self-evident wisdom of building an Arc de Triomphe in Washington to hold all our drones,” Clinton said, drawing laughter from the room. “Some of this stuff — it’s hard to make up,” he added.
Inside the Arch Proposal
Trump has tucked the project into the celebrations marking the country’s 250th anniversary. The plan puts a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery, bridging the gap between Washington, D.C., and Virginia. The president has also pitched it as a military asset: drones could be stored there, and snipers could use it as a perch. Adverse effects on the surrounding landscape are something his administration has acknowledged the project will have. Fairgoers saw a model of the arch on the National Mall on July 10, the closing day of The Great American State Fair.
Trump arrived at United Nations headquarters on September 22 for the 81st session of the General Assembly, the same day Clinton spoke.
The Kennedy Center Name Fight
Clinton, 80, moved next to the battle over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. A federal judge blocked the Trump-picked board from attaching the president’s name to the institution and from putting it on its campus, ruling that any such change would require approval from Congress. A vote by the board has since closed the building for renovations. Trump, once the courts barred the renaming, floated tearing the center down instead of putting congressional funds toward repairs, saying demolition could follow if he does not receive recognition.
To Clinton, the fight over the lettering is a small matter that has pushed weightier ones aside. “You really think 100 years from now anybody’s going to care very much about whose name’s on what building?” he asked, adding that what happens inside the building — and outside it — counts for more.
From there he returned to a message he has carried since his own run for president more than 30 years ago. Diversity is an asset rather than a liability, he told the audience, and collaboration produces better results than conflict. Those in power could meet nearly every challenge the world faces, he said, if they worried less about claiming credit and did more for the least fortunate.
A Warning Against Zero-Sum Politics
Much of the speech dwelled on artificial intelligence, paired with a critique Clinton leveled at what he called zero-sum thinking among the country’s political leaders. American politics, he said, cannot rest in the nation’s 250th year on the premise that one side’s win requires the other side’s loss. The appeal, he allowed, is easy enough to understand: rich rewards have gone to leaders around the world who have taken that approach, he said, and no other country has shown the payoff more plainly than the United States.
His language sharpened as he went. There are days, he said, when he can scarcely believe what is happening in a country he loves. Those in charge, he said, have written one standard for themselves and another for everyone else; they have turned the machinery of government into a tool for settling personal grievances, pursuing opponents and suppressing speech; and they have made federal operations a source of private profit for themselves and their allies.
“That violates the spirit and letter of the Emoluments Clause of our Constitution,” Clinton said.
Not once did he say Trump’s name. Even so, the 42nd president has offered few sharper assessments of Trump’s presidency in recent months than these remarks.
A Swipe at His Own Party
The White House was not his only target. With democratic socialists and progressives racking up primary victories over the past year, Clinton told the gathering that the right and the left are both offering competing visions of socialism. The question, he asked, is whether it should be socialism for everybody or socialism reserved for the wealthy and well-connected. The politics of brute force, he added, is something he rejects.
Two developments have left him more hopeful about the country’s direction, he said. Minnesota erupted in backlash after federal agents shot two U.S. citizens during an immigration enforcement operation, and the Supreme Court declined, for now, to let stand the Trump administration’s proposed procedures adding new restrictions to voting by mail.
A lifetime, Clinton told the audience, offers only a handful of decisions that shape both personal history and the history of everyone around us — and this moment, he said, is one of them. Neither fight he singled out has been settled. The arch remains a proposal, its model already paraded before the public on the National Mall, and the courts have so far barred the renaming of the Kennedy Center.
