President Donald Trump’s proposals for a Garden of Heroes, a monumental “Freedom” arch, a massive ballroom addition to the White House, and modifications to the Washington Monument reflecting pool have intensified long-running battles over public monuments and historical memory as the nation’s 250th birthday approaches next month.
Paul Farber, director of Monuments Lab, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that examines which American stories are memorialized in public, said the Trump administration’s projects are contentious not only for their content but for the process around them. “The relationship between our symbols and systems of democracy are entangled — and have been since the very beginning of the American experiment,” Farber said. “Symbols and systems of power reflect on one another.”
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.” The garden will feature “statues of the greatest Americans to ever live,” according to the president. As covered in prior MSI reporting, the project was first proposed during Trump’s first term and is now being accelerated to partially open by the July 4, 2026, anniversary.
The president has also pursued other monument-related projects. In the past week, Trump said “Death and Destruction” would be rewarded to anyone who stalls construction of his privately funded, 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom — a facility he has described as a “monument” to himself. Some reports put its capacity at 900; others at 1,350. Trump also threatened to walk away from the Kennedy Center if his name is not added to it.
Farber said the ballroom project carries political symbolism. “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.
Among other Trump-backed projects are a monumental “Freedom” arch in Washington and a plan to turn the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument a color resembling a Bahamian luxury hotel pool. The U.S. Treasury has also said it is preparing to print a new $250 bill that could feature a portrait of Trump, though a law bars printing U.S. money with the image of a living person.
“The relationship between our symbols and systems of democracy are entangled – and have been since the very beginning of the American experiment,” Farber said. “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.”
The broader debate over monuments extends beyond Trump’s projects. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has called for removing former Mayor Ed Koch’s name from the 59th Street Bridge. In Columbus, Ohio, a coalition of Italian-American groups has filed a lawsuit seeking to restore a 22-foot-high, 3-ton statue of Christopher Columbus to a plinth. The Trump administration has erected a statue of Columbus near the White House and also placed a statue of Caesar Rodney, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who enslaved people, that was taken down in 2020. A highway marker honoring Confederate General Robert E. Lee has been returned to a public square in Charleston, South Carolina.
Trump has also erected a statue of himself at his Doral golf course in Florida.
Farber, whose lab has been studying monuments since 2012, pointed to the inscriptions planned for the Garden of Heroes as likely to provoke further debate. “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 fighting against, is itself revealing,” Farber said. “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.”
All U.S. presidents have memorialized themselves through presidential libraries. Trump has proposed his own library within a hotel complex in Miami large enough to fit an Air Force One Boeing 747. But Farber said Trump’s approach is unprecedented. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” he said. “This is 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 it’s consistent to the way branding has played out through this administration,” Farber added. “The victories are being tallied, and monuments proposed at frenetic speed, before history can tell us what the legacy of this administration truly is.”