Trump Requests Smithsonian to Install George Washington Statue and Create Center for American Heroes
Why a Statue of Washington Is a Weapon, Not a Decoration
When a ruler orders heroes into marble and rivals out of sight, he is not curating taste but fortifying his position in the state’s imagination.
A ruler does not quarrel with a sculpture because he has suddenly discovered his eye for beauty. When a leader gives a great museum only days to remove a “strange modernist” piece and demands in its place an 11‑foot George Washington, taken from a spectacle of racing and flags, we are not in the realm of art criticism. We are in the struggle over what may stand at the center of a nation’s house of memory, and who has the right to rearrange that furniture. The command to install Washington in Flag Hall and to let him dominate the entrance is an attempt to seize the vestibule of the American imagination.
The order does not end with a single statue. It comes wrapped in a program: a five‑year exhibition in honor of Washington, timed to stretch to the three‑hundredth anniversary of his birth, and the creation of a “Center for American Heroes” to tell tales of builders, soldiers, and reformers who helped the country better live its founding ideals. Here the effectual truth is plain. A ruler under constant judgment binds himself to the most sacred national symbols, not because he is pious but because this is the firmest altar from which to preach his own innocence and greatness. To stand beside Washington is to borrow his armor.
When I wrote *The Prince* (in W.K. Marriott’s translation), I said that most men judge more by the eye than by the hand, because everyone can see but few can touch. Here, the eye is everything. The “Infinity” sculpture is attacked with a single phrase: it “says nothing about America.” Washington, by contrast, “says everything about America.” This is not an aesthetic argument; it is a claim of representation and exclusion. The leader seeks to appear as guardian of what “really” counts as American, casting the existing curators as strangers in their own museum. If the people accept this frame, the quarrel over metal and stone becomes a referendum on who loves the country more.
In republics as in principalities, symbols are arms. Not pikes and cannon, but banners and saints under which men willingly march. A “Center for American Heroes” is, in intention, a foundry of such arms. Stories of citizens who faced great challenges, defended the country, and helped it live up to founding ideals provide a usable pantheon. Set this against a sculpture denounced as mute and abstract, and you have arranged the field: on one side, legible heroism; on the other, obscurity allied with indifference to the founders. It is shrewd. In a time of tumults, whoever can present himself as the natural heir of the founding myths gains an advantage over rivals who speak only in curatorial jargon.
Yet as I argued in the *Discourses on Livy* (in Ninian Hill Thomson’s translation), no new mode or order stands without arms of its own. A decree is not an arm; it is a wish. What are the forces that can compel a great national museum—staffed by learned men, bound by procedures and customs—to tear out a sculpture that has stood since 1967 and replace it with a racing‑ground colossus? There must be legal authority, control of budgets, pressure from allied magistrates, or at least the threat that disobedience will draw the people’s anger. Without such supports, a bold order turns theatrical, and nothing ridicules a ruler’s majesty faster than commands that are flouted without consequence.
Here the people become decisive. In the *Discourses* I favored the judgment of the people, under good laws, over that of a single prince, because they are more constant and less easily corrupted by private passions. If the public truly believes that Washington and the other founders are neglected, that the museum has betrayed its charge, then a leader’s assault on “Infinity” may rouse not only applause but a genuine movement to reorder the nation’s memory. But if the people see in this only a personal quarrel dressed in patriotic costume, they may side with the institution, if only to check the prince. A ruler who invokes the founders against every opponent discovers that even Washington’s shadow can be overused.
The best objection is that all this is mere spectacle, that statues and exhibitions change nothing in the bowels of power. This is the counsel of those who have never governed. Spectacle, when skillfully deployed, decides which acts are remembered as founding and which as shame, who is counted among the heroes and who is written off as a “strange” deviation. To command that a sculpture be removed and Washington enthroned is to attempt a small ritorno ai principii, a forced return to first principles as one man defines them. Whether he succeeds will depend not on the nobility of the aim but on the quality of his arms and his feel for the people’s temper. Whoever owns the foyer of the national story is already halfway to the throne room.
From the works cited
- The Prince — Appearances are a hard currency of power: most people judge by the eyes rather than the hands, by results rather than processes. Analyze reputation, ceremony, and narrative as assets on the balance sheet, not as decoration.
- The Prince — Ask what the actor's survival incentives are before asking what morality requires: a leader's first imperative is to maintain the state, and you must expect them to do what maintenance demands.
- Discourses on Livy — The people, collectively and under good laws, are wiser and more constant than princes — but an unchecked people is as dangerous as an unchecked prince. Mixed orders that set appetite against appetite outlast anything pure.