The Trump administration is on a pro-Confederacy roll, with two monuments brought back in 24 hours.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday that a Confederate memorial would be reinstalled in Arlington Cemetery after the statue’s removal in 2023 by Hegseth’s predecessor, Lloyd Austin, the country’s first Black defense secretary.
“Moses Ezekiel’s beautiful and historic sculpture—often referred to as ‘The Reconciliation Monument’—will be rightfully be returned to Arlington National Cemetery near his burial site,” Hegseth wrote on X.
The statue is likely more often referred to by the name it’s had since its construction in 1914: the Confederate Memorial.
“It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history—we honor it,” Hegseth continued.
The memorial featured a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy” and included “highly sanitized depictions of slavery,” according to Arlington Cemetery’s website. The statue also had a Latin inscription that characterizes the South’s secession as a “noble ‘Lost Cause.’”
The Confederate Memorial is the second monument honoring the pro-slavery South that the Trump administration has recently resurrected. The National Park Service announced Monday that it would restore and reinstall the statue of Confederate General Albert Pike that was toppled during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
NPS describes the statue as a tribute to “Pike’s leadership in Freemasonry,” leaving out his Confederate background. The move is part of Trump’s “Executive Order on Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
It’s yet another instance in which the Trump administration is actively revising the past. Whether scrubbing mentions of queer and transgender Americans from the Stonewall website or quietly removing references to Trump’s impeachments from a Smithsonian exhibit (which the museum now says will be restored “in the coming weeks”), it’s clear that the administration is committed to promoting its version of the nation’s history—“truth” and “sanity” notwithstanding.