WASHINGTON – President Trump issued an executive order on Friday that instructed federal law enforcement authorities to prosecute people who damage federal monuments or statues and that he threatened to withhold funds from local governments that do not protect their own statues from vandals.
The order, which Trump announced on Twitter, comes as he seeks to exploit a cultural gap in the United States during his reelection campaign, suggesting that Democrats are waging an assault on the nation’s history.
“Anarchists and left-wing extremists have tried to advance a marginal ideology that portrays the United States of America as fundamentally unfair,” writes Trump in the order, which is titled “Protection of American Monuments, Monuments, and Statues and Fight Against recent criminals. ” Violence.”
The order adds: “The key targets in the campaign of violent extremists against our country are public monuments, monuments and statues.”
It is a response to the collapse of statues and monuments in the past few weeks after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis sparked protests for police reform and social justice.
But order offers little in the way of a new authority. Directs federal law enforcement officials to prosecute “to the maximum extent permitted” individuals who violate existing federal laws that already criminalize damaging or destroying a monument or statue.
The order also calls for the prosecution of anyone caught “attacking, removing or disfiguring representations of Jesus or other religious figures or religious works of art.”
Protesters across the country have demolished monuments, mostly of Confederate generals. In Raleigh, North Carolina, statues of two Confederate soldiers were demolished. And in San Francisco, a crowd overthrew a bust of Ulysses S. Grant, even though he was a Union general who defeated the Confederate Army. (Protesters noted that he also owned slaves.)
In Washington, protesters tore down a statue of Albert Pike, the only honest Confederate general in the city, and unsuccessfully attempted to tear down a statue near the White House of Andrew Jackson, the nation’s seventh president.
In the order, Trump accuses local governments, such as Washington, of having “surrendered to the mafia government, endangering the security of the community, allowing the total violation of our laws and privileging the violent impulses of the mafia. on the rights to respect the law. ” the citizens.”
In an attempt to punish governments that the president said have looked the other way during the destruction of the monument, the order directs officials to consider withholding funds and grants.
But it is unclear whether the Trump administration could really follow through on that threat. The president made a similar threat to withhold funds from so-called sanctuary cities, which limit his cooperation with federal immigration agents. This year, an appeals court blocked him.
