President Donald Trump is moving forward with plans for a National Garden of American Heroes after former President Joe Biden cancelled the project in 2021.
Trump has listed the people he’d like to see in it, and liberals are not going to like many of them, because many of the honorees don’t fit their narrative about America as a nation steeped in oppression.
“Mr. Trump wants the statue garden ready for next year’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts have announced a $30 million contest to pay for statues to populate the garden,” The Washington Times reported.
The $30 million for statues was made available after the NEH cancelled 85 percent of its grants following Trump’s taking office in January, according to The New York Times.
Trump laid out his vision for the Garden of Heroes in his speech at Mount Rushmore on July 3, 2020, saying, “Americans must never forget their country’s miraculous story and proud heritage.
“You should never lose sight of it,” he contended, “because nobody has ever done it like we have done it. So today, under the authority vested in me as President of the United States, I am announcing the creation of a new monument to the giants of our past. I am signing an executive order to establish the National Garden of American Heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.”
President @realDonaldTrump announced the creation of a new monument: the National Garden of Heroes!
It will be a vast outdoor park featuring statues of the greatest Americans who have ever lived. We will honor extraordinary citizens from every part of our nation. pic.twitter.com/Q8obzrUUl0
— The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) July 5, 2020
Trump followed up his July 2020 executive order with another in January 2021, shortly before leaving office, listing the many statues of people that will make up the garden.
Is it important for future generations to know America’s real history?
The president wants 250 statues, in all, one for each of the 250 years of the country’s history since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The NEH will award up to $200,000 per statue to artists who will create them, according to an April news release.
Some of those historical figures that he wants commemorated should not be too controversial, even for liberals, like John and Samuel Adams, Muhammad Ali, Susan B. Anthony, Louis Armstrong, Neil Armstrong, Irving Berlin, Civil War Gen. Joshua Chamberlain, Frank Capra, Julia Child, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Edward R. Murrow, Jesse Owens, Rosa Parks, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, Jimmy Stewart, and Shirley Temple.
🚨 JUST IN: Trump announces the National Garden of American Heroes will include several African American icons:
– Kobe Bryant
– MLK Jr
– Frederick Douglas
– Jackie Robinson
– Harriet Tubman
– Muhammad Ali
– Rosa Parks
– Billie Holiday
– Coretta Scott King
– Arethra Franklin pic.twitter.com/V1jEMk74eH— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) February 20, 2025
But others are likely to get their hackles up, especially among the woke crowd that supported tearing down statues during the “summer of love” in 2020.
They included abolitionist Frederick Douglass, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Ulysses S. Grant, who all had their statues pulled down or otherwise vandalized in 2020.
Douglass was a “dyed in the wool Republican” by his own description, while Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and Grant, all owned slaves, though Grant liberated the one slave he owned for about a year before the Civil War. He then fought to end slavery nationwide and to protect black citizens of the South after the war.
The wokesters probably also won’t like Christopher Columbus (a European explorer/colonist, who supposedly destroyed the Americas), Patrick Henry (slaveholder), Puritan governor John Winthrop (separation of church and state), conservative Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman (opposed big government), or originalist Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (upheld the plain meaning of the Constitution).
They certainly won’t like Ronald Reagan being in the garden. He made a mockery of the entire liberal worldview in the 1980s, showing it to be false, as he reignited the American spirit and economy and won the Cold War against the communists.
Who knows? The liberals may not even like World War II generals George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur being in there, because they promoted American exceptionalism and the virtue of the American soldiers around the world.
The Washington Times reported that no location for the Garden of Heroes has been chosen yet, but one thing is for sure: liberals, regrettably, will find plenty of reasons to bellyache about it.
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