Pete Hegseth Unveils Return of Pro-Slavery Monument

The Trump administration is on a pro-Confederacy roll, with two monuments brought back in 24 hours.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday that a Confederate memorial would be reinstalled in Arlington Cemetery after the statue’s removal in 2023 by Hegseth’s predecessor, Lloyd Austin, the country’s first Black defense secretary.

“Moses Ezekiel’s beautiful and historic sculpture—often referred to as ‘The Reconciliation Monument’—will be rightfully be returned to Arlington National Cemetery near his burial site,” Hegseth wrote on X.

The statue is likely more often referred to by the name it’s had since its construction in 1914: the Confederate Memorial.

“It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history—we honor it,” Hegseth continued.

The memorial featured a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy” and included “highly sanitized depictions of slavery,” according to Arlington Cemetery’s website. The statue also had a Latin inscription that characterizes the South’s secession as a “noble ‘Lost Cause.’”

The Confederate Memorial is the second monument honoring the pro-slavery South that the Trump administration has recently resurrected. The National Park Service announced Monday that it would restore and reinstall the statue of Confederate General Albert Pike that was toppled during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

NPS describes the statue as a tribute to “Pike’s leadership in Freemasonry,” leaving out his Confederate background. The move is part of Trump’s “Executive Order on Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

It’s yet another instance in which the Trump administration is actively revising the past. Whether scrubbing mentions of queer and transgender Americans from the Stonewall website or quietly removing references to Trump’s impeachments from a Smithsonian exhibit (which the museum now says will be restored “in the coming weeks”), it’s clear that the administration is committed to promoting its version of the nation’s history—“truth” and “sanity” notwithstanding.

The Trump administration is contorting itself in order to not release the Epstein files.

Senior administration officials are expected to meet Wednesday night at the vice president’s residence to discuss their available options for the Epstein files—one of which reportedly includes having deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche go on Joe Rogan’s podcast to discuss the scandal, according to CNN.

The meeting will include Blanche as well as White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Vice President JD Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel.

“Sources say that there have also been internal discussions about what exactly Blanche’s next step could be, including holding a press conference or doing a high-profile interview, possibly with someone like Joe Rogan,” reported CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Tuesday night.

Blanche met with Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell for multiple days last month, spurring concern that the White House was considering a pardon for the convicted sex trafficker.

Another option reportedly discussed among the senior officials includes releasing the transcript or audio of Maxwell’s interview with Blanche.

The Trump administration has been in a tailspin over the case files since the beginning of July, when the Justice Department directly contradicted Bondi on the existence of Epstein’s “client list,” eliciting surprise and upset from the deepest pockets of the MAGA leader’s base.

But rather than release the Epstein files and provide the transparency so demanded by his supporters, Donald Trump decided to go in a different direction and accrue a new list of Epstein’s clients from Maxwell. Maxwell, in turn, directly appealed to the president and the Supreme Court in pursuit of a pardon.

A senior Trump administration official told CNN Thursday that Trump was not considering clemency for the convicted sex trafficker, though Trump underscored to reporters just days prior that he was “allowed” to give her one.

Meanwhile, Americans are increasingly disturbed by Trump’s handling of the entire fiasco. A poll published by Emerson College Polling in July found that just 16 percent of Americans approved of the way Trump was managing the Epstein scandal, while more than half of polled Americans—51 percent—disapproved.

Some defenders of Texas Republicans’ plan to rejigger the state’s congressional districts at the behest of President Trump might be inclined to suggest there’s some fair rationale for the move.

Not state Representative Mitch Little, a Texas Republican who explained brazenly to CNN Tuesday that it’s a Machiavellian partisan maneuver.

CNN’s Brianna Keilar asked her guest why the Texas GOP is attempting to redistrict now when it just did so four years earlier after the last U.S. census.

Little put it plainly: “Because we can. We have the votes. It’s legal for us to do so. It’s legal for us to draw the lines based on political performance. We have three Hispanic-predominated districts in south Texas that we believe that we can carve out for Republican leadership in the United States Congress,” he said—which, he claimed, will “be a good thing for Texas.”

“Because you can,” Keilar repeated. “Why should you, though?”

Little replied: “Because it’s good for our party, it’s good for our state, and we need to ensure that Donald Trump’s agenda continues to be enacted throughout his second term,” Little said. (Note that “our party” apparently came to mind quicker here than “our state.”)

Little and his fellow Republicans, he continued, see this gerrymander “as the difference between Democrats trying to impeach President Trump again during the second half of his final term as president of the United States or accomplishing the agenda that all the voters in Texas, by a significant majority, sent him to accomplish.”

“So you’re doing this for President Trump?” Keilar pressed.

“We’re doing this for Texas,” Little insisted. “President Trump doesn’t call me. I don’t think he has my phone number. But what I would submit to you is: This is the best thing for Texas and its representation in the United States Congress.”

Donald Trump had an interesting morning on Tuesday. At 8 a.m., he took to the airwaves, where he spun a web of lies to justify firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ commissioner for a report indicating a fragile labor market.

He then spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as Trump’s deadline for Russia to take steps toward peace in Ukraine approaches. (The president’s promise to end the Russia-Ukraine war within 24 hours of taking office has been broken by nearly 200 days.)

Then Trump took a stroll on the roof of the White House, to the bafflement of reporters below.

Asked what he was doing, Trump said, “Just taking a little walk. It’s good for your health.” Asked what he’s building “up there,” he made a vague gesture that clarified little, possibly in the shape of a dome, and said, “Something beautiful.”

Trump was joined by James McCrery, the architect for the president’s plan to add a $200 million ballroom to the White House, suggesting the possibility of more plans to introduce the president’s “dictator chic” design taste to the People’s House—which has traditionally been modest by design, symbolizing “civic republicanism,” notes scholar Andy Craig.

USA Today suggested Trump’s Tuesday trip to the roof could “be a first for a president.” But this isn’t true. President Carter, for instance, recounts taking visitors up to the White House roof to stargaze and enjoy full privacy in his book A Full Life.

Carter wrote a meditative poem about one such experience, in which he observed geese flying through the dimming sky over Washington. It begins:

I recall one winter night
going to the White House roof
to study the Orion nebulae,
but we could barely see the stars,
their images so paled by city lights.

Unlike Carter, Trump was sure to make himself the center of attention during his visit. His reflections on his experience up there were also less elevated than Carter’s. After disappearing from view for a few minutes Tuesday morning, the president returned, joked that he was building “nuclear missiles,” dodged a question about Gaza, and headed back inside.

The White House has apparently decided that some of the administration’s DOGE-directed firings were a mistake.

The National Weather Service has received permission to hire hundreds of employees, CNN reported Tuesday. That includes 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians to replace the ones that were let go from the agency at the behest of former DOGE chief Elon Musk.

The order also includes 126 openings for “front-line mission critical” personnel that had been previously approved, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official who spoke with CNN.

The agency’s recent shortcomings have come under scrutiny in the aftermath of the Texas floods, which killed at least 120 people, including 35 children.*

Cuts to the department had severed contracts for more than 550 people, dropping the weather service’s staffing levels to below 4,000 total employees and sparking fears that the country could find itself terribly ill prepared amid peak hurricane season. It’s possible that some of the new hires could be former employees brought back to the agency.

NWS employees have been cautiously receptive to the news, which was first announced at an all-hands meeting on Monday, according to CNN. Exhausted staffers who had been tasked with working additional hours with added responsibilities due to the abrupt layoffs are reportedly irate at the realization that their peers’ job loss was pointless.

“How much time/money is it going to cost to train a bunch of new people when we had already-trained people in place?” an unidentified NOAA official told CNN.

It’s not the only recent rescission of Musk’s efforts atop the federal government. The Office of Personnel Management released a memo to employees Tuesday announcing the end of Musk’s extremely controversial email initiative requiring federal employees to document their weekly accomplishments to the department.

Musk and Trump were practically inseparable until the pair fell out over Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which included funds to undo some of DOGE’s work. The world’s richest man—and Trump’s biggest financier—accused the tax plan of being “pork-filled” while promising to torpedo Republicans’ midterm success by funding their opponents’ campaigns. (He failed to sway any Republican votes.)

In the aftermath of the bill, Trump and the tech billionaire unloaded on one another on each of their respective social media platforms, accusing each other of being unlikable, untrustworthy, and even unreal.

* This post originally mischaracterized the NWS response to the Texas flooding.