The Trump administration has spent more than half a million dollars to erect a statue of a slaveholding Founding Father in Washington, D.C., years after it was removed. The statue is part of Trump’s larger controversial remodeling of the nation’s capital, and it comes as part of the president’s broader agenda to roll back the moves toward diversity made over the last few years.

Trump administration rushes to restore controversial statue

Mother Jones reports that the Trump administration recently erected a statue of Caesar Rodney in Washington, D.C.’s Freedom Plaza. Rodney was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, having quickly traveled from Delaware to Philadelphia and persuaded his state’s delegation to support American independence. A statue commemorating his ride was erected in Wilmington in 1923.

The statue was removed amid the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 because of Rodney’s ties to slavery. Although he pushed for Delaware to ban the importation of enslaved people, Rodney enslaved up to 200 people himself.

As Mother Jones detailed, the National Park Service moved the statue out of storage and placed it in its current location near the White House in April. To erect the statue, the Department of the Interior paid $527,226 just to build the base on which it was placed. This was double the original estimate for the job, which was completed as part of a no-bid contract awarded by the government to restore Freedom Plaza.

The money spent on the Rodney statue was twice the government’s original estimate, and the additional expense was incurred to rush the project ahead of the July 4 celebration of the United States’ 250th anniversary.

“The work was expedited to ensure it is done before our nation’s 250th,” an Interior Department representative told Mother Jones. “All of the projects throughout D.C. are set to be done before the Fourth, so they have to be done on a rolling basis.”

Trump’s attempts to remodel Washington, D.C., and rewrite American history

The installation of the Rodney statue is part of Trump’s large-scale renovation project for landmarks throughout Washington, D.C., a project that has drawn significant controversy.

Most notably, the administration has drawn scorn over its remodeling of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, spending $14 million in another no-bid contract on a project that has seen the pool fill with green algae and the blue paint applied to its surface crack and peel.

Trump also demolished the East Wing of the White House, with a controversial plan to replace it with a multimillion-dollar ballroom and underground bunker. The project, plagued by a lack of transparency and a ballooning budget, has drawn opposition from both parties.

The restoration of the Rodney statue also continues Trump’s campaign to oppose diversity efforts and reshape how American history is publicly presented. Trump has long criticized the removal of Confederate monuments, such as the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee that became the focal point of the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, protests.

Since Trump’s return to office, the Defense Department has restored the names of Confederate leaders to several military bases after those names were removed under the Biden administration. Under Trump’s anti-DEI policies, federal institutions, including the National Park Service, have removed commemorations of prominent Black individuals and removed public displays of information related to slavery and racism in American history.

As Trump commemorates the 250th anniversary of the United States, he continues to promote a version of the country’s history that downplays issues such as slavery. And as the expensive restoration of the Rodney statue shows, the president is willing to spend significant amounts of taxpayer money to promote his preferred version of American history.