U.S. President Joe Biden has cancelled his predecessor Donald Trump’s plans to build a National Garden of American Heroes, which would have memorialized figures ranging from George Washington to Kobe Bryant.
In an executive order signed Friday, Biden rescinded six Trump actions, including two outlining plans for the garden and a third calling for harsh prison sentences for anyone convicted of vandalizing existing monuments, reports the Associated Press.
All three orders were part of the former president’s response to the Black Lives Matter movement. As protests swept the nation last summer, demonstrators toppled and defaced statues and monuments—mainly those commemorating Confederate leaders, but also other controversial figures, such as Christopher Columbus and George Washington, a slave owner.
Trump saw such moves as an attempt to tear down “America’s cultural heritage,” and deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., to protect monuments in June.
Protesters gather around the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue on June 6, 2020 in Richmond, Virginia, amidst protests over the death of George Floyd in police custody. Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images.
Days later, Trump issued an executive order reinforcing the Veteran’s Memorial Preservation Act, stating that the U.S. would “prosecute to the fullest extent possible under federal law” anyone who “destroys, damages, vandalizes, or desecrates a monument, memorial, or statue.”
“These statues are not ours alone, to be discarded at the whim of those inflamed by fashionable political passions; they belong to generations that have come before us and to generations yet unborn,” the order read.
Trump announced his plan to build a sculpture garden memorial last July 4, during a fireworks display at Mount Rushmore. It called for the garden, which was branded as “America’s answer to this reckless attempt to erase our heroes, values, and entire way of life” to be created by 2026.
A statue depicting Christopher Columbus is seen with its head removed at Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park on June 10, 2020, in Boston. Photo: Tim Bradbury/Getty Images.
In one of Trump’s final acts in office, he revealed the garden’s planned honorees (even though it was clear the project would never be completed under a Biden presidency). The list contained 244 names, ranging from politicians to athletes to actors, all of whom were meant to represent “the greatest Americans to ever live.” It included Julia Child, Davy Crockett, Billy Graham, Whitney Houston, Harriet Tubman, Antonin Scalia, and Cy Young, among others.
The garden’s cancellation is largely symbolic, since no congressional funding had been designated for the garden, nor had a site been selected.
Biden has also revoked a Trump order calling on the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the alleged censorship of Trump on social media.