Trump Adds Founding Father Statues to Rose Garden Clutter

President Donald Trump looks toward a statue of Benjamin Franklin in the Rose Garden after returning to the White House from Florida on May 3, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Photo: Anna Rose Layden/Getty Images

Since his first term, Donald Trump has been trying to build a “National Garden of American Heroes,” featuring statues of random historic figures he thinks are cool. Trump announced the idea in 2020, describing it as retaliation against the “angry mobs” tearing down controversial monuments. But Trump’s dream keeps being thwarted. In 2021, Joe Biden reversed his predecessor’s executive order to begin developing the garden. In May 2026, Trump announced that the project was back on and he’d found a spot to erect the 250 statues, D.C.’s West Potomac Park. But a lawsuit filed by a group of preservation and cultural heritage organizations has stalled that plan.

So in the meantime, Trump is satisfying his statue craving by adding scuptures of various Founding Fathers to the White House Rose Garden.

While Trump usually likes to unveil White House renovations himself on Truth Social, today the Washington Post broke the news that a statue of Thomas Jefferson went up last week. It’s the fifth life-size bronze statue added to the Rose Garden during Trump’s second term:

The piece brings to five the number of sculptures Trump has installed in the Rose Garden, joining George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, as well as a sculpture called “Freedom’s Charge,” which honors Revolutionary War soldiers. The Franklin, Hamilton and “Freedom’s Charge” sculptures are on loan from Harlan Crow, a conservative art collector and political donor who had installed them on his Old Parkland corporate campus in Dallas, a spokesperson for Crow confirmed. The White House has not previously disclosed where the statues originated, saying only that they were on loan from “generous private American patriots.”

The statue itself looks good. It was created by George Lundeen, whose family of sculptors has created bronze pieces for public spaces around the country.

Obviously, Jefferson is one of our more controversial Founding Fathers, but that’s the point. Earlier this year, Trump had Baltimore’s toppled Christopher Columbus statue moved to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. And the list of proposed statues for the National Garden of American Heroes includes picks that are provocative (Antonin Scalia) and simply odd (beloved-yet-Canadian TV host Alex Trebek).

On its own, adding a four Founding Father statues and a monument to Revolutionary War soldiers is Trump’s least problematic White House renovation. The issue is that he’s cramming these statues into a Rose Garden that’s already been paved over and filled with Mar-a-Lago-esque patio tables, redundant gold signs, a giant mirror, the “Presidential Walk of Fame,” and lots of random gold wall embellishments.

And it seems unlikely that he’ll stop here. The Lundeen family has also sculpted a life-size bronze statue of Trump for his West Palm Beach golf course (not to be confused with the larger than life-size gold Trump statue at his Miami golf course). How long until Trump decides the Rose Garden needs a statue of him, along with all the other presidents? Maybe they’ll be having a party, with autopen Biden, and bronze Jimmy Carter passed out on the couch.

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