Trump Has Dismantled More Monuments Than Any Protest
Amid a national uprising for racial justice and a deadly pandemic that’s disproportionately impacting Black, Latinx and Native communities, President Donald Trump is promising lengthy prison sentences for anyone who destroys or dismantles a monument to a slave-owning president or leader of the Confederacy.
At a Saturday campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Trump came to the defense of Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, whose statues have been defaced and removed in recent weeks. “The unhinged left-wing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments ― our beautiful monuments,” he said, adding that “they want to demolish our heritage.”
And after protesters attempted to topple a statue of slave-owning Trump hero President Andrew Jackson near the White House on Monday, Trump announced on Twitter that he had “authorized the Federal Government to arrest anyone who vandalizes or destroys any monument, statue or other such Federal property in the U.S. with up to 10 years in prison.” Effective immediately, he added, but “may also be used retroactively for destruction or vandalism already caused.”
But it is Trump who has done the most damage to national monuments, dismantling or desecrating four federally protected land and water sites with significant cultural, archeological and natural resources.
Those rollbacks include carving more than 2 million acres from a pair of protected national monuments in Utah — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante ― in December 2017. The boundary of Bears Ears, a 1.35 million-acre landscape that several tribes consider sacred, was cut by 85%. Nearby 1.87 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante, the largest land national monument in the country and rich in both archeological and paleontological resources, was cut roughly in half. This month, Trump signed a proclamation to greenlight commercial fishing within Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, a vast protected site off the East Coast ― a move that goes against the very purpose of designating a marine sanctuary.
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/trump-dismantle-national-monuments-222245790.html
