$34 million for sculptures of Whitney Houston or Kobe Bryant: This is what Trump’s patriotic garden will look like

He attempted it during his first term in office, but who knows if a lack of time, support, or trust prevented him from carrying it out. But now, in 2025, with no one to stop him, he is marching forward with the plan. U.S. President Donald Trump has approved continuing with an idea he had seven years ago: the construction of a massive so-called National Garden of American Heroes, where 250 “great figures of America’s history” will be honored through statues created specifically for the occasion.

The project has a date: 2026, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence from the United Kingdom. Trump has been longing for this event for years. Now, he’s putting it into action. Shortly after taking office for his second term, he signed an executive order announcing his intention to celebrate it in style. He has created a task force for this purpose, which he himself chairs, accompanied by some of his highest officials, from the secretaries of State, Defense and the Interior to the Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

What the order makes abundantly clear is that Trump is still keen on the same idea he signed in January 2018 in his first order (later revoked by Joe Biden): to create an eccentric and expensive garden. In fact, Trump wants the necessary names added to the initial list in order to reach 250 “historical figures from America’s past who have contributed to our cultural, scientific, economic, and political heritage.” These include presidents — from Abraham Lincoln to John Adams, the Roosevelts and John F. Kennedy — to activists like Martin Luther King, Jr., religious figures like Friar Junípero Serra, but also Christopher Columbus, Buffalo Bill, the writers Harper Lee and Edgar Allan Poe, the actors Shirley Temple, Ingrid Bergman, Charlton Heston and Bob Hope, the boxer Muhammad Ali, the singers Whitney Houston and Billie Holiday, the basketball player Kobe Bryant, the filmmakers Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the businessman Steve Jobs, and the astronaut Christa McAuliffe, who died in the Challenger shuttle disaster.

The project is already underway. In late April, the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts announced they would allocate $34 million (€30 million) to the program. The call for proposals provides some additional details, although some loose ends remain: for example, the location of the famous garden is still not specified. Furthermore, the condition that it should be ready “prior to the anniversary celebration” has been changed to “as soon as possible.”

Of that money $30 million (€26.7 million) will go to grants for the creation of statues by artists; the remaining $4 million will be reportedly allocated to administrative matters and, in principle, to the garden itself. The sculptures must be made “of marble, granite, bronze, copper or brass.” Each artist will be eligible for a maximum of $200,000 (€177,000) for each of their works, although they can create up to three in total. However, only U.S. citizens may apply for the funds. To do so, they will have to submit “a two-dimensional or three-dimensional graphic representation of the preliminary concepts,” as well as a description of the proposed project and the work plan. The deadline for submitting projects is July 1, 2025, and after approval, there will be eight months for execution.

The choice of heroes that Trump wants to honor is striking. These types of spaces were more common in Ancient Rome, the city Trump and his followers seem to revere, or in periods like the 17th and 19th centuries. For example, in Madrid, Spain, there is something that until a couple of years ago was known as the Pantheon of Illustrious Men, now renamed the Pantheon of Spain, with mausoleums to illustrious figures of the country such as the politicians Cánovas del Castillo and Sagasta. The project had quite a few problems getting off the ground, and it never quite became what Queen Maria Cristina of Habsburg had envisioned: a grand Italian-style neoclassical building housing the remains of some of the nation’s greats, from El Cid to Goya.

The United States already has something similar. In the mid-19th century, Congress invited each state to donate a pair of statues to the Capitol. That was the basis for the National Statuary Hall, a chamber full of sculptures from different eras, depicting figures selected by the states. There are statues of celebrated men such as Martin Luther King and the 18th-century missionary Fray Junípero Serra, but also of high-profile women and activists such as Rosa Parks, the civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, and the educator and suffragist Frances E. Willard.

With his choice of figures and his particular way of honoring them — through realistic, human-scale statues — Trump makes it clear that he wants a country that worships people of very varied merits, but chosen centrally. It is, once again, a populist step in the president’s long career in this field. Creating a large space to honor certain personalities fits with Trump’s esthetic idea: placing the people he considers heroes in prominent places, creating an exclusive, divisive circle, like his rhetoric, and paying tribute to them through stories he considers instructive.

It’s not far from the Roman Empire’s idea of exalting the heroes of the homeland. The style seems to fit their new world order. Less than a year ago, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, owner of Meta, and Trump’s new good friend, commissioned a two-meter sculpture of his wife, Priscilla Chan. “Reviving the Roman tradition of making statues of your wife,” he wrote on his Instagram profile, alongside an image of Chan in bronze green with a large golden cape.

This initiative is part of a larger raft of orders that follow the president’s same imperative style, seeking to worship a supposedly American essence, as if the country were devoid of outside influences. For example, the establishment of English as the official language, or his order for the “restoration of names that honor American greatness,” such as the already famous Gulf of Mexico or, now, Gulf of America. At the beginning of 2020, he was already speaking about imposing by law an official type of architecture, neoclassical in style, that is to say, a conservative one.

This type of architecture, featuring large columns, domes, and grandiloquence, is present in a multitude of buildings, especially official ones: city halls, courthouses, museums... The White House and the Capitol follow the same lines. But they have never been built following an official line, because one never existed. In fact, that’s the point: the freedom of creation, of new styles, of innovative buildings or artistic works that break new ground. That’s where art lies. In a conversation with this newspaper regarding this proposal in 2020, the architect Charles Renfro stated: “One need only think of Hitler’s devotion to Albert Speer to remember that architecture is a reflection of power. We should be very concerned.”

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