The Only Dead People Donald Trump Even Pretends to Care About Are Statues
Politics

I have long been of the opinion that all statues of humans (with only two possible exceptions) are bad—either they’re a hagiographic paean to extremely bad men (or more rarely, bad women!) or hideous, or often both. A majority of Americans now believe it’s time to take down Confederate statues, a shift that is due largely to the organizing work of Black activists, who have been calling for the removal of monuments to the Lost Cause for years. Now the movement has spread beyond Confederate statues, to include Christopher Columbus, Junipero Serra, and others whose legacy is inseparable from racist violence. Even some of the white descendants of Thomas Jefferson don’t want a monument to their ancestor up on the National Mall anymore, preferring instead to replace Jefferson with a statue of Harriet Tubman.
But to Donald Trump, who is very good at reading the room and then doing the exact opposite of what most people outside of his rabid base want, now is the perfect time to put up even more statues of bad men! As he announced during his fascist speech last Friday in front of Mount Rushmore—a speech that was protested by a group of indigenous activists who were pepper-sprayed and arrested by law enforcement—Trump plans on building what he called a “National Garden of American Heroes” somewhere in the United States. Let’s take a look at who exactly he considers an “American hero”—Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman are included in the list, but also… Billy Graham? Antonin Scalia? Help!