Billy Graham, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass: Who Trump wants in the ‘National Garden of American Heroes’ – USA TODAY
Uploaded by on July 5, 2020 at 4:47 am
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President Donald Trump announced during a speech in front of Mount Rushmore on Friday an executive order to establish a “National Garden of American Heroes” featuring statues of “historically significant Americans.”
The executive order includes a list of former American presidents and historical figures to feature – with Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, Amelia Earhart, and Billy Graham among them.
Trump’s effort to build more statues comes as protesters across the U.S. have torn down statues in protest of police violence against Black people in the wake of George Floyd’s death in May.
Trump has condemned the protesters tearing down statues, which have included Robert. E. Lee and Christopher Columbus, among others, and signed a separate order in June to provide long prison sentences to people who remove or vandalize statues and other historical monuments.
In his speech Friday in South Dakota, Trump said protesters were “determined to tear down every statue, symbol, and memory of our national heritage.” The executive order also mentions efforts to tear down statues.
“To destroy a monument is to desecrate our common inheritance,” the order says. “These statues are not ours alone, to be discarded at the whim of those inflamed by fashionable political passions; they belong to generations that have come before us and to generations yet unborn. My Administration will not abide an assault on our collective national memory.”
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