Americans could soon get the chance to walk by life-size statues of luminaries, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Muhammad Ali, after President Donald Trump’s “National Garden of American Heroes” was greenlit.
Packed into the president’s so-called “big, beautiful bill” that was passed earlier this month is a 2025 executive order to build the garden to celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence.
Trump originally proposed the garden in January 2021 as confederate statues were being torn down across the country. The initial executive order states: “The National Garden is America’s answer to this reckless attempt to erase our heroes, values, and entire way of life.”
The newly passed legislation carves out $40 million to build the garden filled with statues of deceased historical figures — in either marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass, according to the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The 2021 executive order laid out nearly 250 names, including TV fixtures Julia Child and Alex Trebek, literary icons Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe, pioneers Amelia Earhart and Sally Ride, sports stars Kobe Bryant and Jackie Robinson, scientists Albert Einstein and Jonas Salk, performers Whitney Houston and Humphrey Bogart, and former presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.
A White House spokesperson confirmed to The Independent the White House is planning on using the list from the 2021 executive order when considering which statues will be made for the garden.
The original list includes 53 persons of color and 53 women, according to a Washington Post analysis. Notably, the 2021 list was made years before Trump’s anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion push. As a result, federal agencies have since scrubbed references to several historic figures they deemed as “DEI” material, including civil rights heroes and trailblazing Black Americans.
In March, the Pentagon removed a webpage about Jackie Robinson, who famously broke baseball’s color barrier. A spokesperson for the Pentagon told The Independent at the time: “As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military.”
Although the original plan was to open the park in time for the July 4, 2026 celebration, the president now hopes for the garden to be completed “as expeditiously as possible,” according to the 2025 executive order.
The site of the garden hasn’t yet been determined, but South Dakota Governor Larry Rhoden suggested the park be built in his state’s Black Hills. In a March letter to Trump, he said: “We have a plot of land available in sight of Mount Rushmore that would be ideal for this fantastic effort.” Local indigenous groups have opposed the idea.
