As US turns 250, Trump adds fuel to battles over monuments and memory

Disputes provoked by public monuments, flags and symbols are intensifying as the US’s 250th birthday approaches next month, and none are so contentious as those proposed by Donald Trump.

Among the recent projects planned by the US president are a Garden of Heroes, a monumental “Freedom” arch, a massive ballroom and turning the reflecting pool at the Washington monument the color of a Bahamian luxury hotel pool.

Trump’s proposals are contentious for themselves, but also for the lack of public consultation around them, says Paul Farber, director of Monuments Lab, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that seeks to answer the question: which American stories ought to be memorialised in public?

Trump has certainly gone full throttle to get his way in a manner that has boosted ongoing fears over his authoritarian behavior. Last week alone, Trump has said “Death and Destruction” will be rewarded on anyone who stalls construction of his ballroom and threatened to walk away from the Kennedy Center if his name is not added.

“The relationship between our symbols and systems of democracy are entangled – and have been since the very beginning of the American experiment. Symbols and systems of power reflect on another,” Farber said.

But its not just Trump involved in contentious public memorials.

In New York, the mayor, Zohran Mamdani, wants former mayor, Ed Koch’s name, off the 59th St Bridge. Then there’s the problem of what to do with libraries, schools and streets named after Cesar Chavez, the Latin labor leader, who died in 1993, revealed by a New York Times investigation to have been a serial sexual abuser, including of minors.

Nor are these new fights. Residents of lower Manhattan toppled a statue of George III in July 1776 and melted it down, in part, for revolutionary war bullets. The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was organized in opposition to a proposal to remove a statue of Robert E Lee, a Confederate general.

In the aftermath, peaking with the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, about 400 Confederate symbols and monuments were removed or renamed nationwide, some toppled but most dismantled after local and state government votes.

Indeed, Trump has said the Garden of Heroes is “a response answer to this reckless attempt to erase our heroes, values, and entire way of life” and will feature “statues of the greatest Americans to ever live”.

“In American history the debate about our future is channeled across who gets to write the narrative of the past, and we are in the throes of that right now,” Farber says. “Nothing is inherently a monument, but the objects, artworks and sites we call monuments. They are often more about power, and the way we build and share power, they are about memory”.

Monuments Lab has been parsing the meaning of monuments since it was founded in 2012. Earlier this year, the lab put on “Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments”, which moved a statue of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa from the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it had been attracting millions of visitors a year, into the museum itself, which had once rejected it. In its place, a statue of Joe Frazier now stands.

And the question of monuments continues.

Six years since the BLM protests, battles over statues have come full circle. A coalition of Italian-American groups has filed lawsuit seeking to restore a 22-foot-high, 3-ton statue of Christopher Columbus to a plinth in Columbus, Ohio. The Trump administration erected a statue of the explorer near the White House and the interior department put up a statue of Caesar Rodney, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a enslaver, that was taken down in 2020.

A highway marker honoring Lee has been returned to a public square in Charleston, South Carolina.

At the same time Trump has erected a statue of himself at his Doral golf course in Florida. Last month, the US treasury said it is preparing to print a new $250 bill that could feature a portrait of Trump and “is conducting appropriate planning and due diligence” in response to legislation that bars printing US money with the image of a living person.

He reportedly told Fox News’ Jesse Watters he’s also building the privately funded 90,000 sq ft White House ballroom as a “monument” to himself – and that he’s doing it “because no one else will” after Watters pointed out it’s four times larger than the house itself. Some reports put its capacity at 900; others at 1,350.

Trump has said that the ballroom will be enjoyed and used by future presidents but Farber sees the move as politically symbolic. “It hardly needs to be said that part of Trump’s project has been to move power from Congress to the executive branch,” he said.

And then there’s the Garden of Heroes, which Trump proposed in his first term, but is now being rushed into semi-complete form in time for Independence Day. With it will come inscriptions that will generate argument in themselves, as Farber points out.

“To say that Martin Luther King Jr had a can do spirit, or he fought for justice, but to not name the injustice he was fight against, is itself revealing. It’s a kind of Faustian bargain. It’s an elevation of history as representation but without the actual story. The ideological project is more than spotlighting key figures, it’s having the power to tell the story in a way that omits the history.”

But all US presidents are prone to memoralising themselves and their administrations through the construction of presidential libraries.

Trump has proposed his own library be within a hotel complex in Miami large enough to fit an Air Force One Boeing 747. A fantasy, perhaps. But Trump, says Farber, has already shown us that he’s intent on memorializing himself and his vision of America in unprecedented ways.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” he says. “This how he’s always operated. He put his name on a memorial to President Kennedy. There’s no precedent in American culture where memorializing a president happens during their term and by their own administration.

“It stretches from statuary to infrastructure and its consistent to the way branding has played out through this administration. The victories are being tallied, and monuments proposed at frenetic speed, before history can tell us what the legacy of this administration truly is,” he added.