The National Endowment for Humanities, a US government institution, provided funding of up to $200,000 (around 172,000 euros) per statue last year. Trump had already ordered the planning of a public sculpture garden by decree during his first term in office and took up the project again shortly after the start of his second term in office.
“I have a job in construction”
“I have two jobs,” Trump said at the end of 2025, with the presidency being just one of them. “I have a job in construction, which is actually a kind of relaxation for me because I’ve been doing it my whole life.” And he likes to see it when his name is on it. He did this at the renowned Kennedy Center and the US Institute for Peace. He even recently praised a gold statue of himself erected by American pastor Mark Burns.
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Neil Flanagan, an architect and historian in Washington, DC, told NPR that while Trump had aesthetic ambitions in his first term, his “insistence on making everything so much about his own style and brand and adorning himself with the glory of America’s past is a feature of this term.”
Many of his initiatives are related to the country’s upcoming 250th anniversary in July. “They’re all sort of proclaiming the glory of America rather than actually creating growth or a future for America,” Flanagan said. “If you try to cut the science budget … and at the same time build these grandiose monuments, you’re not building a creative America, you’re wearing the great American past like a costume.”
The renowned architectural historian Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani even made historical comparisons in an interview with t-online: “The parallels are obvious. And instructive. Through his cultural conformity, Hitler excluded many good architects who could have represented the state virtuoso. In the end, predominantly mediocre architects built for him.”
Kobe Bryant and Walt Disney
So now Trump wants to honor American heroes. Shortly before the end of his first term in office, there was even a list of Americans who should be immortalized in the park. Basketball player Kobe Bryant, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, chef Julia Child, Walt Disney, black rights fighter Frederick Douglass, aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Whitney Houston and former President Ronald Reagan.
