Donald Trump wants to install a “national garden of American heroes” in a Washington park

The idea is five years old, but it was sleeping at the bottom of a drawer. At the end of his last term, Donald Trump proposed during a ceremony commemorating the American National Day to set up a “Garden of American Heroes” to pay tribute to the “great figures in the country’s history”. A series of 250 sculptures representing Founding Fathers, athletes, activists, businessmen, politicians and cultural figures. Tuesday January 13, Washington Post provided new information on this project that the American president intends to advance this year.

According to our colleagues, the Trump administration has agreed in recent days on an ideal location to install the memorial garden. She would like to develop a park in Washington DC, West Potomac Park, a few steps from the monuments dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. For the moment, the American presidency has not specified the exact location of the site. She could set her sights on the southern tip of the park, indicates the Washington Postwhere there is a sports complex.

At the beginning of January, in the columns of New York TimesDonald Trump personally indicated that his “Garden of American Heroes” would probably be located in “an area that adjoins a golf course”. This could be one of the explanations for the recent acquisition of the various municipal golf courses in Washington by the White House, even if the American president specifies that this is not yet a “final decision”.

Project abandoned by Joe Biden

In 2020, a few months before the end of his first presidential term, Donald Trump launched this project in response to institutions and activists who had dismantled numerous memorials after the death of George Floyd. Their targets? Mainly southern generals from the Civil War or figures from American history who practiced or defended slavery. “Angry mobs are attempting to tear down statues of our founders, desecrate our most sacred monuments, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities”he then declared. At that time, the White House had counted on the park opening on July 4, 2026, to celebrate the 250^e anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

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Ultimately, the project never saw the light of day. Donald Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in the presidential election and the Democrat issued a decree canceling those of his rival concerning the “Garden of American Heroes”. The idea has also received strong criticism from historians who have called it” random “ et “thoughtless” with “choices offered ranging from the strange to the probably inappropriate, even provocative”. Many sculptors were also very skeptical. They particularly deplored the deadlines imposed by Donald Trump, which made the project “unachievable”.

It was only when Donald Trump returned to the White House, in January 2025, that the garden returned to the heart of the debates. The US President revoked Joe Biden’s decree and demanded the project be carried out “as quickly as possible”. Congress then allocated some $40 million in grants in July to implement it.

A ballroom and a triumphal arch

This project in the American capital also echoes two other projects launched by Donald Trump. The first, currently in progress, saw the complete destruction of the east wing of the White House which will be rebuilt to house a “great golden ballroom”, as the American president put it. Here again, this is an old idea of ​​the Maga leader who even offered, during the time of Barack Obama, to find funding for such a project.

A few weeks later, Donald Trump invited the press for the presentation of another design: the creation of a monumental triumphal arch, again in Washington, opposite the Lincoln Memorial. The project, work on which is to be launched in the coming weeks, presented three models of different sizes, compared to the Parisian Arc de Triomphe. Donald Trump had not hidden his preference for the larger, wider and higher arch than the Place de l’Etoile. For whom would this neoclassical construction, crowned with a golden victory, be built, a journalist asked? “For me,” replied straight away the president whose project was immediately baptized “Trump’s arc”.