July 4, 2020

Trump Orders National Statue Park Creation
as Payback for Protester Assault on Heritage

By Mike Hailey
Capitol Inside Editor

President Donald Trump used Mount Rushmore as the backdrop for an executive order that he unveiled on Friday night with plans to earmark public funds to build a national park that's dedicated to the rebuilding of monuments that have been taken down since protests erupted across the nation on the last holiday weekend.

Trump declared that the elaborate tribute to figures from the past would be named the National Garden of American Heroes - or National Garden for short. The decree that he signed at the White House before the trip to South Dakota establishes a Task Force for Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes that will be chaired by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt who introduced Trump at the speech in front of the one that would be the hardest to move.

The special commission will be a collaborative effort with several federal agencies responsible for the planning for the outdoor statue museum that he says must be ready for business by Independence Day in 2026. That's less than half the amount of time that it took a Ku Klux Klan member to design Mount Rushmore.

Trump didn't say how he planned to have a country pay for the new national park at a time when the federal government has been spending record sums of money on emergency subsidies for states, businesses and a historic and growing number of people who've lost jobs during the pandemic.

But Trump acted as though the COVID-19 crisis didn't exist in the speech that gushed with praise for the dead presidents who were gazing from above while attempting to create the impression that America had been under attack from a radical left that has ignited a full-blown culture war that's bent on the destruction of statues and desecration of history.

Trump touted the national memorial for monuments with grandiose hyperbole that made it sound something like a mix of Disney World, the Smithsonian and Madame Tussauds House of Wax.

"These statues are silent teachers in solid form of stone and metal," the president proclaimed in the directive. "They preserve the memory of our American story and stir in us a spirit of responsibility for the chapters yet unwritten."

Trump might have given some people false hopes, however, when he lamented how the left-wing mob had targeted monuments for "Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Francis Scott Key, Ulysses S. Grant, leaders of the abolitionist movement, the first all-volunteer African-American regiment of the Union Army in the Civil War, and American soldiers killed in the First and Second World Wars."

But Lincoln and Washington were the only names on that list who made the first Trump cut for the heroes who he plans to have on display when the new national park opens in six years if it isn't delayed as much as the border wall that he'd promised to build as the signature sales point for his first campaign four years ago.

Trump decreed that the National Garden would begin with a metal cast of historical luminaries including John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Henry Clay, Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Billy Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Audie Murphy, George S. Patton, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Betsy Ross, Antonin Scalia, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, and Orville and Wilbur Wright.

Trump accused people who've been protesting against social injustice of an assault on "our common inheritance" with their attempt to have the U.S. disown the vestiges of racism that statues that were built in other centuries have glorified.

But Trump didn't mention if he'd make room in the monument park for something that would pay homage to the Washington Redskins decision to dump the mascot in a direct response to FedEx threat to cancel the naming rights to the stadium where the team currently plays.