Trump Wants To Build More Statues — Here Are Three People Who Don’t Deserve Them

Under an executive order signed Friday, President Trump has ordered a “Task Force For Building And Rebuilding Monuments To American Heroes” to start building statues of the following people:

John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Henry Clay, Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Billy Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Audie Murphy, George S. Patton, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Betsy Ross, Antonin Scalia, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, and Orville and Wilbur Wright.

Now, there are a good portion of these men that I do not like, but I am not broken up about them getting a statue. John Adams was quite possible the most authoritarian president in United States history, but he was also the second president, first vice president, and the first president to lose re-election.

However, I can point to at least three people who, without a shadow of a doubt, are not worthy of getting monuments in any sane or just society — let alone one built by a task force with the term “American Heroes” in its name.

One: Corrupt Sectary Of State Henry Clay

As of 2020, the only presidential election where no candidate got a majority in the Electoral College was in 1824. The race in question was between four members of the Democratic-Republican Party, Sectary Of State John Quincy Adams, Senator Andrew Jackson, Sectary Of Treasury William Crawford, and Speaker Of The House Henry Clay.

Clay originally planned to simply be within the top three candidates, as under the Twelfth Amendment the top three candidates can then be selected President by the House of Representatives. However, Clay failed and came out in forth place out of four candidates.

Despite Senator Jackson winning the most electoral votes, Clay made sure it was Adams who was picked to be President by the chamber of Congress he controlled. Why did he do such a thing? Because Adams agreed to make Clay his Sectary Of State, and no other reason. This deal later became known as “the corrupt bargain” and was one of the major reasons Adams lost a second term to Jackson in 1828.

Had Jackson or Crawford promised to do the same as Adams did, they would have become America’s sixth President. Far as I, and most Americans, are concerned, Clay is a black-mark on American political history who should not be honored in anyway.

Two: Famous Fraud Billy Graham

Billy Graham is known for one thing and one thing alone, being a Christian who also talked about politics. Even among evangelicals of that era, Graham was fairly moderate all things considered compared to the far-right Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

Graham however shared one thing with many of the worst televangelists: He was a massive fraud.

In 2012, Graham removed Mormons of his church’s list of cults, where it had sat for years. Why did he do this? So members of his church could go and vote for Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential Election, and no other reason.

In 1969, Graham told his good friend President Nixon to bomb the dikes in Northern Vietnam — which would have killed around one million people according to estimates from the Nixon administration. Graham’s reasoning was that the North Vietnamese were communists, and as such anything we do against them is justified. This is great and all, but it doesn’t explain him calling North Korean dictator Kim Il-Sung “one of the great fighters of freedom,” during a speech in 1999. A man who both caused and prolonged a massive famine in the 1990s, but was also a good friend of Billy Graham.

In 1960, Billy Graham was going all out trying to get as many Protestant minsters to speak out against then-Senator Kennedy’s bid for President, stirring up anti-Catholic bigotry in the process. A year later, Graham was playing golf in Florida with President Kennedy — because Billy Graham was a fraud!

One more example, in 1972, Graham made a series of highly anti-Semitic comments in private with his friend Richard Nixon. At the same time this was happening, Graham was giving public speeches showing support for the Jewish state of Israel.

Billy Graham would change his message depending on who he’s talking, as well as depending on who in power was interested in talking to him. He had no standards, no integrity, and no dignity; had Joseph Stalin offered to pay for him to visit Moscow, Graham would take it in a heartbeat.

Three: Lunatic General Douglas MacArthur

To call Douglas MacArthur a madman would be to put it lightly, this disgraced general removed by President Truman in 1951 deserves to be forgotten and not honored in any sense.

To put it bluntly, MacArthur tried to get the United States into a war with China during the Korean War. Despite Truman giving MacArthur the benefit of the doubt when he first tried various times in 1950, MacArthur kept overstepping his bounds.

That’s really what it came down to, as Truman said in the 1960s on the subject:

I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.

Might I remind you, the President who wants to build statues of this man is also running on a platform of “law and order.”