A Journey Through Trump’s Bizarre Statue Garden of American Heroes

The president wants to permanently honor 250 Americans with statues near the National Mall. The list is not as controversial as you’d expect, but there are some weird inclusions.

President Donald Trump is obsessed these days with reshaping Washington, D.C., in his own image. He demolished the White House’s East Wing and plans to build a grandiose ballroom atop it. He wants to build a massive triumphal arch on the road between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial—ostensibly to honor the troops, but, according to Trump, to actually honor him. Giant banners with his face now hang from several federal buildings, and he has affixed his name to the Institute of Peace and the Kennedy Center. The U.S. Mint plans to issue a coin bearing his image, defying a statutory ban on adding living people to U.S. currency, while the State Department plans to issue a select number of passports bearing his grim visage.

Of these many projects, one of them constantly fascinates me: the National Garden of American Heroes. Trump first pitched the concept of a park featuring statutes of more than two hundred prominent Americans in an executive order in the tumultuous summer of 2020. It went unpursued during the Biden administration, but has received new attention during Trump’s second term. Of all his plans to physically reshape the capital, this one is on the firmest footing, both legally and financially: Congress last year appropriated the whopping sum of $40 million to complete it. According to a New York Times account over the weekend, Trump now plans to place 250 statues on a piece of parkland near the National Mall used for public recreation and sports, with the first ones placed by the 250th anniversary of American independence this July.

The proposed garden is a perfect window into how Trump’s presidency has largely failed. Like many of his initiatives, this one appears to have begun with something he saw on TV. Activists tore down multiple statues across the country during the George Floyd protests in 2020, typically as part of a broader reckoning over racial injustice in American history. Trump, who opposed the protests, apparently concluded that the best solution would be to build more statues.

“My Administration will not abide an assault on our collective national memory,” he declared in the 2020 executive order. “In the face of such acts of destruction, it is our responsibility as Americans to stand strong against this violence, and to peacefully transmit our great national story to future generations through newly commissioned monuments to American heroes.”

Trump’s list of “American heroes” is eclectic, to say the least—but not entirely as controversial as you’d imagine. Many of the statues would depict people who would undoubtedly be included if any other president had proposed this. There are astronauts like Neil Armstrong, inventors like Thomas Edison, explorers like Amelia Earhart and Lewis and Clark, and artists like Elvis Presley, Mark Twain, and Whitney Houston. A clear majority of the honorees are people that Americans first learn about in elementary school.

Plenty of early Americans and colonial founders would get a plinth. Christopher Columbus—a frequent target of statue vandals, and one of Trump’s preferred selectees—gets one despite never setting foot on U.S. soil. So do early patriots like Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and Crispus Attucks. Betsy Ross gets a statue for designing the American flag, while Francis Scott Key gets one for writing a song about it. Multiple Founding Fathers are included, as well as three First........

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