Written By Lexx Thornton
President Donald Trump is still defending the Confederacy in 2025.
The National Park Service announced on Aug. 4 that it intends to restore and reinstall a monument honoring Albert Pike just miles from the U.S. Capitol grounds. The announcement fails to mention that Pike was a Confederate general who fought to protect slavery.
It also continues to make clear what parts of American history the Republican Party and Trump want so desperately to commemorate – and erase.
It’s part of a recent push by the Trump administration to restore “truth in American history” by undoing all the progress made in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. The statue announcement comes after Trump began restoring the names of Army bases that were once named for Confederate soldiers. Back in March, he signed an executive order that called for a federal review of the monuments that were removed in 2020.
Pike, a Freemason and member of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party, was a Confederate general who served for less than two years before resigning. His troops were accused of scalping Union soldiers. There are claims that he was a leader in the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War, but historians say this can’t be proven.
After his death in 1891, the Freemasons requested that a statue be built in his honor. The statue of Pike was approved to be built by Congress in 1898 and erected in 1901, decades after the Civil War ended. The National Park Service website admits that the memorial has been controversial since it was first planned. In 1992, the DC Council requested that the statue be removed. The council reaffirmed this request in 2017. The statue was toppled on Juneteenth in 2020 with no intervention from police.
“The D.C. police are not doing their job as they watch a statue be ripped down & burn,” Trump, who was still in his first term as president, tweeted at the time. “These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our Country!”
So why is Trump hellbent on bringing back a monument to a man who wasn’t even good at being a Confederate general? It’s simple: He’s doing so because he can. It’s a move to show U.S. constituents that Make America Great Again doesn’t just refer to a time when Republicans were in power; it refers to a time when honoring racists was commonplace.
