With a new executive order this week titled “Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday”, US president Donald Trump is bringing back his first-term plan to create a “National Garden of American Heroes”.
The garden is to be completed “as expeditiously as possible” for the US’s semiquincentennial in 2026. The order further stipulates that the number of “heroes”—among them politicians, musicians, scientists, inventors, Hollywood actors, athletes and activists—total 250 for the occasion. It remains unclear where such a giant sculpture garden could be located, given that each person would be represented by a statue, nor how their likenesses will be commissioned.
“The National Garden will be built to reflect the awesome splendour of our country’s timeless exceptionalism,” Trump wrote in his originall 2021 executive order, “Building the National Garden of American Heroes”. Signed in the last days of his first term as president, the order identified 244 people to be commemorated.
The list included predictable people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr alongside a scattershot selection of dead celebrities including the basketball superstar Kobe Bryant, chef Julia Child, singer Whitney Houston and television host Alex Trebek. The names of politically divisive figures like Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, Antonin Scalia and Barry Goldwater appear alongside those of Hannah Arendt, Woody Guthrie and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The visual artists on the list—Ansel Adams, John James Audubon, Charles Willson Peale, Norman Rockwell, Gilbert Stuart, John Singer Sargent—point to a very specific aesthetic. (One wonders who the final six heroes will be; perhaps Jimmy Carter, Joseph McCarthy and Hugh Hefner will appear among them.)
“In short, each individual has been chosen for embodying the American spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure, courage and confidence, loyalty and love,” reads the 2021 document. “Astounding the world by the sheer power of their example, each one of them has contributed indispensably to America’s noble history, the best chapters of which are still to come.”
Trump’s new executive order also reinstates one he signed in 2020, “Protecting American Monuments, Memorials and Statues, and Combating Recent Criminal Violence”, in the aftermath of protests over Confederate monuments. The order seeks to prosecute “to the fullest extent permitted under federal law” anyone who “destroys, damages, vandalises, or desecrates a monument, memorial or statue” in the US. This could mean a ten-year prison sentence. (No Confederate generals appear on Trump’s “American heroes” list.)
Trump’s previous executive orders concerning the garden and US monuments were overturned by his successor, Joe Biden, in May 2021. Congress had never set aside funds for the original garden project.
Earlier this work, following another Trump executive order targeting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, the Smithsonian Institution and the National Gallery of Art both shut down their diversity offices.
