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Trump Sees Showdown Over Statues as Path to Political Gain

Trump Sees Showdown Over Statues as Path to Political Gain

Late in May, as protests over the police killing of George Floyd erupted across the U.S., a crowd in Birmingham, Ala., toppled a bronze statue of Charles Linn, a captain in the Confederate Navy and a notable banker in the city after the war. It was the first domino to fall: In the weeks that followed, demonstrators in dozens of cities set their sights on statues of Confederates and other historical figures, leaving a number of empty pedestals in their wake.

This did not escape the attention of President Trump. On June 26, he signed an executive order on protecting America’s monuments and memorials. The document frames widespread unrest as a siege coordinated by a network of militant left-wing extremists. To make its case, the White House focused on examples of overcorrection, namely a statue of President Ulysses S. Grant that was toppled by protesters in San Francisco. (Grant, who led the Union Army that defeated the Confederacy and who smashed the original Ku Klux Klan, was the last president to own a slave.) With his poll numbers waning, Trump sensed an opportunity and rushed to the defense of America’s silent minority: its statues.

The executive order is at the heart of the crisis in Portland, Ore., where unidentified federal law enforcement agents scooped up protesters. Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives, led by Democrats, voted on July 22 to remove sculptures of Confederate figures from the Capitol. All of which raises the question: When did statues become such a big deal?

Perhaps it was inevitable that the Black Lives Matter protests would turn their attention to local monuments. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are about 1,700 memorials to the Confederacy across the U.S., including schools, streets, and military bases named for its leaders. Many of the 700 or so physical Confederate memorials (equestrian statues, busts, plaques, and other monuments) occupy pride of place in the parks and plazas where protesters nationwide are staging actions. The rise of Jim Crow coincided with the City Beautiful movement in urban design, landing Confederate statuary at the center of urban-planning efforts across the South— Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., being the prime example. Taken together, these memorials form a national infrastructure of Lost Cause ideology. By design, they’re hard to miss.

The movement to uproot these sculptures, a long game for the civil rights community, took on new urgency after the 2015 massacre of nine churchgoers at an historic Black church in Charleston, S.C. (The killer, Dylann Roof, sported a Confederate flag in photographs.) In the year that followed the Charleston attack, local and state authorities around the country removed or rededicated some 114 Confederate symbols, by the SPLC’s count. The movement has accelerated dramatically over the past two months: According to BeenVerified, a public records search engine, at least 104 Confederate symbols have been removed since Floyd’s death on May 25, almost as many as have come down in the past five years.

A frequent objection to removing Confederate monuments is that it erases history. But “most people don’t get their history from monuments,” says Patricia Davis, a cultural studies scholar and associate professor at Northeastern University in Boston. “What they get from them is a lesson in who has the power. The only reason we’re hearing about these monuments and talking about these things is because they’re being removed.”

Trump Sees Showdown Over Statues as Path to Political Gain

The statue uprising has met resistance in state capitols, district courts, and above all, the White House. One administration strategy to combat statue violence is to build more of them. On July 3, Trump signed another executive order, this one authorizing a National Garden of American Heroes to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026. Like a Social Studies Hall of Fame, the garden will feature dozens of statues of incontrovertible icons (Betsy Ross, Jackie Robinson), as well as some questionable inductees and omissions (the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is named, but Thurgood Marshall is not). Certainly the order includes some oddities: It forbids any modernist design and imagines leadership roles for the chairs of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, agencies the administration has repeatedly tried to eliminate. On its face, though, a National Garden of American Heroes is a harmless, even treacly proposition—a salve, maybe, for Americans truly pained by images of tarnished equestrian bronzes.

But the June 26 directive is darker, and far more consequential. The executive order contains a provision enabling the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to dispatch federal police forces “to assist with the protection of Federal monuments, memorials, statues, or property.” Investing federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, with the power to summon federal police, even over objections from local and state governments, it serves as the statutory authority for Diligent Valor, the operation at a federal courthouse in Portland. (On July 29, DHS and Oregon Governor Kate Brown said they had agreed to a withdrawal plan.) Attorney General William Barr spent July 28 testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on the deployment, among other matters. At the hearing, Democratic Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island said federal “officers are using abhorrent tactics” such as tear gas against peaceful protesters; Barr responded that such methods are needed “to disperse an unlawful assembly, and sometimes unfortunately peaceful protesters are affected as well.”

Joe Biden’s sizable lead in presidential preference polls suggests the Statuedämmerung is not high on the list of priorities among the voters Trump needs to win over. Ultimately, the president seems to misunderstand not just why but also how so many monuments are coming down. City and state lawmakers are responsible for removing more statues than angry crowds are: The prospect of demonstrators leveling memorials has spurred officials to follow through on past promises to remove the more odious ones.

Take Birmingham. The day after protesters pulled down the statue of Linn—on Jefferson Davis Day, a state holiday in Alabama—the mayor ordered that the nearby Confederate Soldiers & Sailors Monument be removed as well. Although images of toppled, graffiti-covered statues will no doubt be among the enduring visuals of this era, cranes are doing most of the work.
 
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