Last week, President Trump installed a new, life-size bronze sculpture of Thomas Jefferson in the Rose Garden, making it the fifth statue he has added to the White House grounds during his second administration, the Washington Post reports.
The piece is another example of Trump-led efforts to install realistic statues around the country of America’s Founding Fathers in particular, partly in reaction to damage done to Confederate monuments and statues of other figures with divisive contributions, following protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by a police officer in 2020.
The Jefferson sculpture is by the artist George Lundeen, who has also made a statue of Trump with his fist raised, in a gesture referencing an assassination attempt against the president during the 2024 presidential election. That statue, made with Joey Bainer and Lundeen’s brother, Mark Lundeen, sits in Florida’s Trump International Golf Club.
As for the Jefferson sculpture, it shows the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and the country’s third president seated while drafting the famed 1776 document. It joins other Rose Garden statues of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton, plus a sculpture of Revolutionary War fighters. The latter three are reportedly on loan from conservative political donor and art collector Harlan Crow.
“The President enjoys showcasing American Excellence and those Americans who exemplify excellence,” Rodney Mims Cook Jr., chair of the Commission of Fine Arts, told the Post, adding “I think he’s spot-on after the billions in patrimony we destroyed after George Floyd died.”
Many of those damaged or removed statues represented figures who have been associated with past violent campaigns and slavery. Jefferson, too, has been subject to similar criticism for owning hundreds of slaves, in contradiction to that most famous of lines he wrote in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.”
“Of course, I know that through the years, President Jefferson has had his ups and downs,” Lundeen told the New York Times. “But without the man, I don’t know if we’d have an America.”
The Jefferson statue is also part of Trump’s broader effort to leave his mark on Washington, D.C., with controversial monuments that he has rushed past standard approval procedures. These range from a proposed 250-foot-tall triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery, and a halted 90,000-square-foot ballroom where the White House’s East Wing once stood, to name a few.
