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President Trump wants to build one, but he’s getting pushback.

A federal panel approved early designs for Trump’s 250-foot-tall triumphal arch yesterday. The decision was hardly a surprise: The committee members were all appointed by Trump. It doesn’t make the structure inevitable — a group of Vietnam veterans has already filed a lawsuit against it, and Congress might get involved — but the vote started a process that could dramatically change the skyline of the nation’s capital. The arch, and its height, are meant to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary.

The Commission of Fine Arts didn’t rubber-stamp the plan. One member suggested that it lose some lions (which are not native to the United States), the golden eagles on the viewing deck and a winged angel on top. There’ll be another vote down the line.

But the tone was largely laudatory. Before the vote, the panel’s chairman called the president’s idea “beautiful.” On the table in front of him, there was a black baseball hat reading “Make Design Great Again.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who presented the plan, said it “embodies American freedom, American unity, American strength and the American dream.”

I asked Michael Kimmelman, our architecture critic, about that. He was blunt:

If it really involves a human architect it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to someone purposefully trying to simulate A.I. slop. It’s an insult to veterans, blocking views of Arlington National Cemetery. It is what you come up with if you’re designing a monument to excess and narcissism.

Michael’s not a modernist snob. There’s nothing the matter with reviving the ideals of ancient Greek and Roman art, he told me. But “size is not the same thing as scale. Classical architecture isn’t a bunch of acanthus leaves and columns on a building.” It’s about proportion and judgment. “The expression of those principles is what conveys dignity and strength, not size and glitter,” he said.

He’s not alone. There’s been a lot of pushback on the design, including from the architecture critic who proposed it, The Times reported. And before yesterday’s vote, the panel received nearly 1,000 messages from the public. “One hundred percent of the comments were against the project,” one commissioner said.

One of the inspirations for the arch is the Arc de Triomphe, the neoclassical monument in Paris that Napoleon commissioned in 1806. Trump has said the goal was “to top it by, I think, a lot.” In fact, as my colleagues report, Trump’s arch would be bigger than nearly every other monumental arch across the globe. Look at the comparisons here.

Michael remembered another ambitious triumphal arch, also meant to outdo the Arc de Triomphe: the one that Adolf Hitler planned to raise in Berlin. It would have been more than 300 feet tall, covered with the names of the nearly two million Germans who died in World War I.

In 1941, construction began. The massive concrete cylinder at the monument’s base was so heavy that it sank into Berlin’s soft, sandy soil, and the project had to be abandoned unfinished. “The idea for the arch collapsed under the weight of its own megalomania,” Michael said.

Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, traded strikes right up to midnight last night, when the cease-fire in Lebanon took effect.

But for now, the truce has halted a conflict that has killed more than 2,100 people in Lebanon and displaced more than a million. At least 13 Israeli soldiers have also been killed, along with two civilians, according to the Israeli authorities.

Hezbollah acknowledged the announcement of the Israeli-Lebanese cease-fire but did not say whether it would abide by its terms.

Thousands of displaced families flooded the main highway to southern Lebanon today. Many still said they feared they would have to flee again.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli troops would remain in southern Lebanon, where they have seized territory.

Since the start of the war between the U.S. and Iran, both countries have fought to control the flow of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. These charts show how effective each side has been.

Stocks may have soared again, but the war in Iran has started to pinch the finances of many Americans.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth renewed U.S. threats to attack Iran’s power plants and other energy sites if its leaders did not agree to a peace deal.

The House voted early this morning to extend for 10 days an expiring law that allows surveillance without a warrant.

In grueling congressional hearings, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seemed to shift his tone on vaccines. He said measles jabs were safe and effective “for most people.”

Trump picked Dr. Erica Schwartz, a Navy officer and former deputy surgeon general who supports vaccines, to be the next head of the C.D.C.

The Senate voted to allow mining around Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, an expanse of federally protected lakes and forests. A Chilean company wants a copper and nickel mine there.

Justin Fairfax, Virginia’s lieutenant governor from 2018 to 2022, fatally shot his wife and then himself, the police said.

In their 2025 joint tax return, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji, reported a combined income of roughly $145,000. That included $1,600 from his rapping and about $10,000 from her art work.

The acting ICE director said he plans to resign.

ICE agents arrested an 85-year-old French widow who married her American military sweetheart last year.

NPR said it had received two gifts totaling $113 million, and that one of them was its largest ever from a living donor.

The musician known as D4vd was arrested in connection with the death of a missing teenage girl whose severely decomposed body was found in the trunk of his Tesla, the authorities said.

Not too long ago, a simple computer filled an entire room. Now we carry complex machines in our pockets. Is there any emerging technology that might make these huge data centers (and the cooling needed) obsolete — or much smaller? | Karen Bowen, Summerville, South Carolina

Cade Metz, who covers artificial intelligence, writes:

Not really. In fact, data centers are moving in the opposite direction, becoming even larger and more power-hungry. Companies like Google are developing new ways of cooling all this computing infrastructure with less water, but Moore’s Law — the notion that the number of transistors packed into each computer chip doubles roughly every two years, allowing computers to get smaller — does not apply in the age of artificial intelligence. A.I. is driven by a new kind of specialized chip that is needed in enormous numbers. That explains the size of these data centers. Have a look at this one from Amazon, which is only partly finished, if you want your mind blown.

The Ezra Klein Show explains why Jeff Bezos’ tax rate is lower than yours.

Here’s a column by M. Gessen on a corporate war crimes prosecution in France.

Winery feud: She wanted to pry her family vineyard from her brothers. Instead, her lawyers paid the largest fine yet for passing off A.I. slop as sound legal reasoning.

Your pick: The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about dumb dogs.

Rolling life: Roger Adams, who invented Heelys, died at 71.

— That’s the median annual cost for full-time infant child care in the U.S. If you live in a city or on a coast, where care is more expensive, the figure may seem low. But it’s still a lot. Why is child care so expensive?

Fraud allegations: A former player on the Alabama football team has been accused of wearing wigs and makeup and posing as N.F.L. players to collect nearly $20 million in fraudulent loans.

N.B.A. playoffs: Oklahoma City is primed for a repeat, and the Knicks may fall short, John Hollinger writes. See more predictions.

Here’s a cool hack on a classic Italian recipe for pasta al limone — it’s chickpeas al limone. Don’t drain the beans before adding — the brine combines with lemon juice, olive oil and grated Parmesan to create a super-silky sauce. (I’d add a pat of butter, too, because I’m reckless.) Rip a ball of burrata in there at the end and scatter some torn basil leaves over the top. So good. What can’t you chickpea?

Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson made their Broadway debuts this week, starring in “The Fear of 13,” about the relationship between a death-row inmate (that’s Brody) and a sympathetic prison volunteer (Thompson). Helen Shaw, our critic, found the production uneven but, hey, judge for yourself: The two actors visited our headquarters recently and performed a scene from the play. Watch.

Baby Keem is Kendrick Lamar’s cousin and protégé, but he says he tended the roots of his autobiographical album, “Casino,” all by himself, in Las Vegas, where he was raised. “There’s curiosity to my story,” he told The Times. “People have these opinions on how I came about.”

The influencer known as Clavicular, who was treated after an apparent overdose, left a hospital and went to a Miami club.

Bike through Amsterdam, even if only in your mind. It’s tulip season!

Play a boring podcast before bed — it helps lessen anxiety to get you to sleep more quickly. (I go with ones about electric vehicles.)

Listen to Kacey Musgraves’s new single, “Dry Spell.” Jon Caramanica, our pop critic, says it’s a return to form for the cheeky Nashville star.

Take our news quiz.

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were affiliating, flatlining and inflating.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Crossplay and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam

P.S. Yesterday, I reported on a survey in which two-thirds of dog owners said that their animals were smarter than the average dog and said that this was “statistically impossible.” Many wrote to correct me. I meant a typical dog, a dog on the street, Yogi Bear’s average dog, the median dog. Except no one would ever say “the median dog.” Could I have written that differently? Probably. No one likes to have to explain something that’s meant to be whimsical. Point taken!

Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.

Sam Sifton, the host of The Morning, was previously an assistant managing editor responsible for culture and lifestyle coverage and is the founding editor of New York Times Cooking.