Donald Trump first came up with his plan for a “National Garden of American Heroes” at the end of his first term, before President Joe Biden quietly tabled it upon replacing Trump in the White House.

Now, with Trump back in the Oval Office – and with the country’s 250th anniversary fast approaching – the project is back. The National Endowment for the Humanities is seeking to commission 250 statues of famous Americans from a predetermined list, to be displayed at a location yet to be determined.

It isn’t clear who compiled the list of 250 to be honored. It includes names that are largely recognizable and whose accomplishments are well-known: politicians like Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy; jurists Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia; activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Harriet Tubman; celebrities such as John Wayne and Julia Child; and sports stars like Kobe Bryant and Babe Ruth.

The statue garden coincides with an executive order from March 2025 in which the Trump administration denounced what it saw as historical revisionism that had recast the country’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.” Instead, it had constructed a story of the nation that portrayed it “as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably........

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