Donald Trump Is Not the Story: The Transformation of Our Monument Landscape

“Emancipation Memorial” by Thomas Ball (Source: The Washington Post)

I was surprised to see this piece in The Washington Post, which features the reimagining of three controversial statues by Philip Kennicott and illustrator David Mahoney, including Thomas Ball’s “Emancipation Memorial” in Washington, DC.

Kennicott and Mahoney take their cue from Frederick Douglass, who delivered the dedication address for Ball’s controversial statue on the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1876. “What I want to see before I die,” Douglass shared in an interview that year, “is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.”

Reimagining Ball’s design, along with Daniel Chester French’s “The Four Continents” and Karl Gerhardt’s “Pioneers of the Territory” is a useful exercise, especially for students, but it seems out of place right now given that the debate surrounding public monuments has died down significantly.

(Source: The Washington Post)

My problem with the article is not the thought experiment, which I encourage you to explore, but with Kennicott’s accompanying text that attempts to place it in context:

Douglass’s critique remains vital today, a radical permission to rethink, remake, repurpose and reinterpret our memorial landscape. With President Donald Trump promising a new National Garden of American Heroes and the restoration of statues taken down following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, we are on the cusp of a new age of memorialization that may return to old tropes of power, like some of those repurposed by Ball.

Kennicott closes the piece out with the following observation:

In 2020-2021, the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Monument Lab surveyed nearly 50,000 monuments and memorials in the U.S., and it found almost 1,000 that mention the word “pioneer.” It uncovered a vast memorial landscape in which war and conquest are overwhelmingly represented, while peace, the arts and science are mostly an afterthought.

“Monuments are not timeless, permanent, or untouchable,” wrote the survey authors. “Each and every monument changes over time.”

Today, another change is coming, as the Trump administration repairs and replaces old monuments to the Confederacy and creates new memorials that use traditional forms, iconography and symbols to celebrate a familiar cast of leaders and heroes.

Douglass’s dream of better memorials may have to wait a bit longer. But it shouldn’t be forgotten.

First, it is true that our monument landscape is still dominated by monuments, memorials, and statues that reflect traditional themes, including “war” and “conquest.”

Trump has ordered the return of a Confederate memorial to Arlington National Cemetery that may or may not happen, but he has made no move to order the return of monuments removed over the past 10 years. Indeed, he has no authority to order the return of monuments removed by states and local communities.

(Source: The Washington Post)

But the biggest problem, in my view, with Kennicott’s analysis is that he completely ignores the dramatic changes we have witnessed to our monument landscape. “Douglass’s dream” has largely come to pass and has likely surpassed anything he could have imagined in 1876.

As just one small example, consider the number of new monuments that commemorate the military service of African Americans during the Civil War—a subject that was very much on Douglass’s mind.

This just scratches the surface of these new monuments.

We have witnessed a flood of new monuments, historical markers, etc. that expand and complicate our monument landscape as well as our broader public memory of American history.

None of this made it into Kennicott’s article. Its omission paints a picture of stagnation and even a retreat from the high-profile and overdue public debates that followed the murder of nine churchgoers in Charleston in 2015, the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, and the police murder of George Floyd in 2020.

We are spending too much time worrying about Trump and not enough time acknowledging the fact that public commemorations of the past are largely carried out at the local level by people who are invested in and committed to improving their local communities.

These local efforts have not diminished one bit since Trump took office again in January 2025. In fact, arguably they have only increased in light of the upcoming 250th anniversary of this nation’s founding.

We also need to recognize that these local projects will outlast Trump’s plan for a National Garden of American Heroes, his decision to slap his name on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, and his continuing efforts to shape public history through the National Park Service and Smithsonian to further his own political agenda.

Hundreds of monuments have come down over the past 10 years, as a result of communities deciding through a democratic process, that they no longer represent their collective values and shared past. And it is very likely that with few exceptions, they are not coming back.

But this is just half the story.

If you really want to appreciate the direction our public memorial landscapes are headed, just take a look at what is happening in many of your local communities.

Trump isn’t the story. The story is ordinary Americans like you and me, who have chosen to work together to transform our public landscapes in ways that bring us all together.

Get involved.