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 Ladies.
A healthy dose of Americana is also present. Johnny Appleseed, or at least the historical figure upon whom the fables were based, gets a statute. So does Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, James Fenimore Cooper, Annie Oakley, and Buffalo Bill Cody. The Wright brothers are each honored. Bob Hope, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and John Wayne are included as well. It is fitting that this tableau includes Norman Rockwell as well, since it almost seems to evoke the mid-twentieth century cultural iconography that he helped evangelize.
Statesmen abound, as they always do with things like this. Seventeen presidents are named, including the likely suspects (George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) and less likely ones (Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge). Prominent Democrats like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy made the cut, as did Ronald Reagan. Among the Supreme Court justices honored are both Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Henry Clay would get a statute, but not his fellow triumvirs Daniel Webster or (perhaps for the best) John C. Calhoun.
The most striking additions, given the Trump administration’s later turns on racial justice, are the wealth of civil-rights heroes. Obvious choices like Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Frederick Douglass are honored. So too are C.T. Vivian, a founding figure in the Black fraternity movement, and founding-era writer Phillis Wheatley. Civil-rights activist Medgar Evers, Nixon impeachment leader Barbara Jordan, three Black NASA scientists depicted in the film Hidden Figures, and multiple prominent Black artists would get statues.
The choices for sailors and soldiers are also better than one might expect. The Trump administration has previously paid tribute to Confederate rebels and restored honors to nineteenth-century U.S. troops who committed war crimes. No such flaws can be found here. The list ranges from celebrated generals of America’s major wars before 1945 to underrepresented figures like Prince Estabrook, a free Black man who fought at Lexington and Concord, and Grace Hopper, a Navy admiral and pioneering computer programmer. More than a few Union Army heroes are honored, while Robert E. Lee was rightfully skipped.
Some choices, on the other hand, likely reflect the quirks and ideological vision of the White House aides who presumably drafted the original list. A few picks, for example, appear tilted toward honoring a particular vision of twentieth-century American conservatism. Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, Jr., Russell Kirk, and Clare Boothe Luce get statutes, as do House Un-American Activities Committee witnesses Whittaker Chambers and Elia Kazan.
Anti-abortion activist Nellie Gray is honored for founding the annual March for Life. Milton Friedman somehow gets a statue as well. Jeane Kirkpatrick, a Reagan-era diplomat who often criticized the United Nations, is among the more obscure choices. In fairness, a Democratic White House that drafted such a list would likely make choices that conservatives probably wouldn’t. William Rehnquist would be swapped out for Earl Warren in a heartbeat, for example.
There is also a predilection for twentieth-century pop-culture figures that feels strangely selective on its own terms and ill-fitting for the project in general. Among the Hollywood figures who would be recognized are Shirley Temple, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlton Heston, and Frank Capra. They are accomplished actors and directors, to be sure, but one gets the impression that Trump was just naming to staffers his personal favorites from when he was a young man.
In other cases, Trump’s lack of personal attention is keenly felt. Of the more than a dozen American religious figures on the list, at least eight of them are Catholic saints and clergy. Some are recognizable names like Junipero Serra, a Spanish missionary who played a major role in California history, or Elizabeth Ann Seton, a founding-era leader of Catholic education who became the first American saint. Others are fairly esoteric, like a Native American saint named Kateri Tekakwitha who died roughly two hundred years before the Declaration of Independence was signed.
Catholics have contributed greatly to this nation’s history, of course, but the overall composition of the selected religious leaders is a little unbalanced. Mormon leader Joseph Smith, abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, and Black Methodist founder Richard Allen were omitted, to name a few. The only rabbi so honored is Alexander Goode, who was selected along with the other three of the Four Chaplains who died in World War II. Reading through this part of the list is like hearing someone say the greatest sluggers of all time are Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Aaron Judge. Solid choices, but they say more about the fan—or, perhaps, the White House aides—than the sport.
Speaking of athletes, there is a strong preference towards baseball. Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Cy Young, and Roberto Clemente would be recognized, as would Jackie Robinson, who broke the sport’s color barrier. His inclusion on the list suggests that the Pentagon’s shameful move to erase Robinson’s wartime service last year was not a top-down initiative from the White House—or, at minimum, from Trump himself. Gridiron football is represented by Native American athlete Jim Thorpe and longtime Green Bay Packers head coach Vince Lombardi, while hockey gets Herb Brooks, who oversaw the Miracle on Ice team in the 1980 Olympics. Jesse Owens and Muhammad Ali also made the cut.
Perhaps the single most baffling inclusion in the entire list is basketball’s sole representative. Among the planned statutes would be one of Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash in 2020. The best-case scenario here is that the aides who drafted the list felt obligated to choose a basketball player after recognizing the nation’s other three top sports and couldn’t think of a better one at the time. Bill Russell died two years after the original order came out; it probably wouldn’t be too late to make a quick substitution for someone more worthy of the honor.
What is most remarkable about the list is how relatively uncontroversial most of the names are. About 80 percent of the names would likely show up on a similar list drafted by the Obama or Biden White Houses. Some of the choices—naturalist John Muir, labor leader Samuel Gompers, pacifist lawmaker Jeanette Rankin, various Native American chiefs, early feminist activists, and a racially diverse group of artists—reflect a much broader vision for America, both demographically and ideologically, than is usually found from the MAGA worldview.
This is not an endorsement of this project, of course. The capital does not really need statues of most of these people. More than a few of them, like King and most of the presidents, are already honored elsewhere in D.C. at their respective memorial sites. Others were good Americans who can be better recognized in other ways. My own personal admiration of former Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, for example, does not extend to commissioning a marble or bronze statue of him at taxpayer expense.
Nor do I think a statute of Trebek would be worth it if means that some of these other historical figures get one as well. The republic will be no better off if we erect statues of Steve Jobs, whose signature product has been a net negative for American society, or Sam Walton, whose company leveraged its sheer size to hollow out small towns and impoverish their residents. Trump’s original executive order described the statues as “silent teachers in solid form of stone and metal.” (You can tell he doesn’t write this stuff.) Some of the lessons they have to offer aren’t worth learning.
There are other problems with this planned garden. One is that statues are hard to make, often taking years at a time. (The Times reports that they plan to get some statues in place by July 4 and add the rest by 2029.) Another one is that there aren’t enough sculptors in America who can make the kind of statues that Trump envisioned. This is not Renaissance Florence, where you can bump into marble sculptors for the Medicis while walking down the street. And even if there were, Trump’s attacks on artistic and cultural spaces have hardly endeared the nation’s top sculptors to work with him.
Unlike his other projects, Trump actually managed to get some buy-in from Congress on this one. But his insistence on personally directing things is only a hindrance from there. When Democrats retake the White House, one of their top priorities will likely be to halt Trump’s vanity projects, like the weird Arlington arch, or at least redirect them to better purposes. The White House will still need an East Wing, but the Democratic-led version will probably nix the grotesque Mar-a-Lagoesque ballroom in favor of something more befitting our nation’s republican heritage.
Trump’s slapdash efforts will make it even easier for his critics and opponents to dismantle. West Potomac Park, the site that Trump hopes to transform with his heroes garden, can be put to far better use than a half-baked site for random statues of Dr. Seuss and Ernest Hemingway. Perhaps the finished statues can be redistributed to other sites if alternatives can be found. But the capital’s public space is too limited and valuable to indulge one man’s vain obsessions.
When the federal government builds public spaces and monuments through collaboration and consultation, they tend to endure. The National World War I Memorial in D.C. was completed throughout Trump’s first term and opened in the first days of Biden’s presidency. When someone governs through personalist rule and tries to reshape the capital’s physical landscape in your own image, it is no surprise that Trump’s successors will treat it as an injury to our cultural heritage instead of an addition to it.
It also helps that Trump’s idea already exists. In the U.S. Capitol, each state has contributed two statues of their state’s most illustrious citizens to the National Statuary Hall Collection. Some of the statues are qualitatively better than others; a few of them honor Confederate traitors who do not belong in the Capitol at all. More than a few of Trump’s selections are already honored there, making his project even more superfluous than it already appeared to be.
The congressional collection holds lessons for Trump as well. The most enduring monuments in this country’s personal life weren’t created in such an ad hoc fashion or through arbitrary forms of governance. What can be built by fiat can be undone by fiat as well. For that reason, Trump’s self-absorbed campaign to reshape D.C. has only ensured that he will leave no enduring physical mark on the nation’s capital in the long run.
