Trump Sees Showdown Over Statues as Path to Political Gain
The White House responded to protesters toppling monuments with federal police to preserve “law and order.”
Artist Dustin Klein projected an image of Representative John Lewis—the legendary civil rights leader who died on July 17—onto the Robert E. Lee Monument in Richmond on July 24.
Photographer: Khue BuiLate in May, as protests over the police killing of George Floyd erupted across the U.S., a crowd in Birmingham, Ala., toppled a bronze statue of Charles Linn, a captain in the Confederate Navy and a notable banker in the city after the war. It was the first domino to fall: In the weeks that followed, demonstrators in dozens of cities set their sights on statues of Confederates and other historical figures, leaving a number of empty pedestals in their wake.
This did not escape the attention of President Trump. On June 26, he signed an executive order on protecting America’s monuments and memorials. The document frames widespread unrest as a siege coordinated by a network of militant left-wing extremists. To make its case, the White House focused on examples of overcorrection, namely a statue of President Ulysses S. Grant that was toppled by protesters in San Francisco. (Grant, who led the Union Army that defeated the Confederacy and who smashed the original Ku Klux Klan, was the last president to own a slave.) With his poll numbers waning, Trump sensed an opportunity and rushed to the defense of America’s silent minority: its statues.