Stone of Hope, Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial / NPS
Donald Trump has once again proposed a national sculpture garden that would honor well-known figures of American history, reviving a similar plan he announced during his first presidential term, but which was never built. It's unclear where the park will be located, how the statues would be commissioned, or who will be commemorated with a statue. In an executive order signed last week, however, Trump said the park should be completed "as expeditiously as possible."
"I have signed an executive order to resume the process of creating a new National Park full of statues of the greatest Americans who ever lived," Trump said this week at a gathering of religious leaders in Washington.
Called the "National Garden of American Heroes," the sculpture garden would be part of a July 2026 celebration of the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding. It would feature 250 sculptures, one for each year of US history. Trump, according to the executive order, will serve as chair of the project.
The original executive order Trump signed in 2020 included a hodgepodge of names of well-known figures from American political history, but also included athletes like baseketball superstar Kobe Bryant, football player Jim Thorpe, and baseball legend Babe Ruth. Musicians Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and Johnny Cash were named, as were writers Hannah Arendt, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau, among many others.
Congress would need to agree to the park's construction and fund it for it to go forward. A statue of religious figure Bill Graham, added to the National Statuary Hall at the US Capitol in 2024, cost $650,000, according to Bloomberg, suggesting the price tag for Trump's garden to be in the many tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars.
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