“It looks like tin foil balled up and woven through bubble wrap,” observes Katrina Bridges, 52, a federal employee on her lunch break outside the LBJ Education Department building on a sunny Wednesday afternoon in September. We’re looking at a sliver of an impressionistic metal landscape of the coastal cliffs at Pointe du Hoc in Normandy, I explain. It was installed that morning, Katrina says. And by the time I got there, National Park Service personnel could be heard worrying over its corroding welds and impossible maintenance.

This mockup of the Eisenhower Memorial designed by “starchitect” Frank Gehry a decade ago and finally approved by the U.S. Fine Arts Commission on Tuesday is imposing and weird, but the final version will extend four acres. It’s a 440-by-80-foot metal-wrought doodle of the cliffs—not at war, as history remembers them, but as they are today if you’re sketching them while drunk. And it’ll be upheld by concrete pillars high as the federal building behind it, with three installments of narrative statuary cowering below: Eisenhower as a barefoot farm boy seated on the wall that will bear his name, Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander instructing troops, and Eisenhower as president. More aptly, per Andy Ferguson, “It’s a sly insult to Dwight Eisenhower and the homespun virtues he typifies in the American imagination.”

Gehry’s design has been batted around bureaucratic D.C. for the last eight years. “In true bipartisan spirit,” Jeffrey Frank observed in 2015, “everyone hates it.” That year, the agency that approves the footprint of a new memorial park, the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), sent Gehry back to the drawing board with concerns over the absurd dimensions of his design. Now, they’re expected to give their go-ahead a week from Friday: NCPC president Preston Bryant told me his misgivings were “at least partially addressed with the removal of a couple of tapestries and columns”—and added an instructive plug for monumental diversity, “Not every memorial has to be of stone or granite and traditional in nature.” In a video posted online, Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose office building Gehry’s tapestry will block from view, surveys the mockup and praises the planned memorial as “gorgeous.”

“There are philistines everywhere, I guess. Don’t quote me on that,” muttered one of the monumental naysayers—anti-postmodernists, Eisenhower enthusiasts—who came to protest via press conference. The design, a “gaudy and four acre plan studded with six-storey piers awkwardly rendered sculpture and the 440-foot woven aluminum screen … desecrates Ike’s modesty and sense of decorum,” said Bruce Cole, an Obama appointee to the Eisenhower Commission and a longtime opponent of Gehry’s design, to reporters in attendance.

Art critic and Weekly Standard contributor Catesby Leigh called it a “memorial theme park” and disdained the postmodern demand for an episodic, rather than symbolic, monument: “The further we get from symbolic design, the further we stray into the swamp of memorial sprawl,” he warned. Marion Smith, who chairs the board of the anti-Gehry, pro-Ike National Civic Art Society, quoted Eisenhower to prove he would have hated Gehry’s garish plan. “Is this improvement?,” Ike implored the audience at his presidential library dedication in ’62 and invoked Michelangelo against the willful forgetfulness of an ugly postmodern aesthetic, asking, “What has happened to our concept of beauty and decency and morality?”

The Eisenhower family protested Gehry’s plans too at first. In a 2012 Congressional testimony, his daughter Susan compared the metal tapestry to an iron curtain and the pillars to missile silos. It’s also not unlike an interstate highway billboard—a likeness her father, she said, would have hated. But since then, the Eisenhowers, the NCPC, and Eisenhower Memorial Commission—the body that selected Gehry’s design—have agreed to a compromise design. According to a spokesman, whom TWS reached via email, “The Eisenhower family is in support of the Memorial Commission’s submission.”

“The last hurdle is getting the sign off from the Secretary of the Interior,” said Justin Shubow, president of the National Civic Art Society, at Wednesday’s presser. He’s hoping Secretary Zinke will pull the plug. A spokesman for Zinke did not return my requests for comment, but “The president can weigh in and direct the secretary not to give final approval. If he does, the memorial would be dead,” Shubow said, portentously.

Now only Trump, who’ll have to OK the $150 million it will cost to build, can save good taste and decency in D.C.’s monumental core. The president’s penchant for petty grievance might come in handy here. And for a jolt of inspiration to spare Ike’s legacy from Gehry’s ego, he need only listen to his own: Frank Gehry despises Donald Trump.

Like many a flaky celebrity, Gehry pledged to move to France if Trump won the election. He also compared him to Hitler, whose speeches he’d heard on the radio as a child. The starchitect’s distaste for the sitting president will make his Eisenhower memorial, THE WEEKLY STANDARD noted earlier this year, “A Monument To Trump Hatred”—one that Trump himself gets to build.