Traditionalists backed by the Donald Trump administration are pushing to restore memorials taken down following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The movement involves lawsuits, lobbying, and executive orders aimed at resurrecting dozens of monuments removed during the nationwide demonstrations.
The protests, which followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, led to the removal of numerous statues of European and American historical figures. The Wall Street Journal has labeled this period the “statue wars.” A total of 261 US historical monuments were removed, vandalized, or toppled during the BLM protests, with more than half related to Confederate figures, based on data from World Heritage USA.
One prominent case involves a 22-foot-high statue of Christopher Columbus removed from City Hall in Columbus, Ohio, in 2020. The city’s Democrat Mayor Andrew Ginther stated at the time that the statue represented the country’s “ugly past.” In April, a coalition of Italian-American organizations filed a federal lawsuit seeking the monument’s restoration, calling its removal “unlawful and discriminatory.”
The plaintiffs argue the statue symbolizes Italian-American heritage and the cultural bond between Columbus, Ohio, and Genoa, Italy, where it was made. “The silent majority is becoming vocal,” Jack Conte, the lawsuit’s organizer, told the Wall Street Journal. “You reach a point where this stuff is shoved down your throat, and you can only take so much of it.”
The Trump administration has taken direct action to support these efforts. Just over two months after taking office in 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to reinstate monuments removed since 2020, if they were taken down as part of an effort to “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.”
In March, the administration erected a Columbus statue near the White House, a replica of one protesters sank in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor during the 2020 protests. Ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary on July 4, the Interior Department returned a statue of Delaware Founding Father Caesar Rodney to Washington’s Freedom Plaza. That monument was removed in 2020 amid criticism that Rodney, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was also a slaveholder.
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