Protesters toppled the DC statue of Confederate General Albert Pike in June 2020. It will be reinstalled in the next few months, the government announced Monday.Liu Jie/Xinhua/ZUMA
Since resuming office, President Donald Trump has sought to rewrite American history, rejecting any signs of historical division and exalting some of the nation’s most notorious oppressors.
On Monday, the latest chapter of this quest unfolded: The National Park Service (NPS) announced that officials will restore and reinstall a Washington, DC, statue of a Confederate general that protesters toppled during the June 2020 protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. NPS’s press release said that the statue of Albert Pike, which was authorized by Congress in 1898 and stood in Judiciary Square, honors his “leadership in Freemasonry,” the male-only secret society. What it does not mention: Pike was a Confederate States of America general who fought to preserve slavery, may have been involved with the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1860s, and commanded Native American troops in an 1862 battle in which they scalped at least eight Union soldiers.
Video obtained by the Washington Post shows protesters pulling down the Pike statue with ropes to cheers in June 2020, which Trump called “a disgrace to our Country!” in a social media post at the time. It was one of nearly 100 Confederate monuments that were removed from public spaces that year, according to a 2021 survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). A report issued by the SPLC earlier this year found more than 680 Confederate monuments still standing.
The NPS cites two of Trump’s executive orders—“Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” and “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”—as part of its justification for reinstalling the Pike statue. The news release adds that the statue has been in storage since its removal and is currently undergoing restorations, and will likely be reinstalled by October. Spokespeople for NPS and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday afternoon on the cost of the restoration or Pike’s history as a Confederate general and supporter of slavery.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC’s nonvoting Democratic delegate to Congress, said in a statement Monday that she will reintroduce a bill to permanently remove the statue. “The decision to honor Albert Pike by reinstalling [his] statue is as odd and indefensible as it is morally objectionable,” she said.
“A statue honoring a racist and a traitor has no place on the streets of DC,” Holmes Norton added.
As jarring as the move may be, it is just one of a series of measures Trump has taken to try to remake the nation’s history in MAGA’s fantasized image—that is, as an historically colorblind and virtuous society. He has attacked the Smithsonian, alleging they have “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and ordering officials to “remove improper ideology” from their properties; that led to the Smithsonian removing references to Trump’s two impeachments from an exhibit at the National Museum of American History, the Washington Post first reported last week. (The Smithsonian subsequently announced that the information would be restored within weeks.) Trump has also, implausibly, declared English the country’s official language.
His edicts have led the US Army to restore seven bases to prior names honoring Confederate leaders, and NPS to remove references to gender nonconforming and transgender people and slavery from its website. Trump’s sycophants in Congress have also tried to make DC a more Trump-friendly town, introducing legislation to rename Dulles International Airport after the president and the Kennedy Center Opera House after first lady Melania Trump.
The latest news is just more proof that, as my colleague David Corn wrote back in April:
Trump has launched a crusade not only against public servants, legal and governmental norms, commonsense economics, science, higher education, DEI programs, and his critics and political rivals, as he vies for wide-ranging power that will allow him to rule as an autocrat. He is striving to become the Big Brother who determines which parts of the American story are legitimate and which are to be suppressed and deleted.
