POLITICS: Trump should restart his bid to defend America’s heritage with a new Sabin Howard monument

Donald Trump has big Day 1 decisions to make. Monumental ones, in fact.

Such as the decision to champion America’s heritage again.

Courtesy of our elite, that heritage was under attack during his first term.

Against a background of destroyed statues, defaced monuments, gutted curriculum, social-media censorship and 1619 Project euphoria, President Trump issued a series of executive orders countering the madness, promoting patriotism and imagining a country that tells its honest story of its exceptionalism in marble, stone and bronze.

These orders — which included creating a Presidential 1776 Advisory Commission, intensifying federal efforts against monument desecration and establishing a National Garden of American Heroes — enraged the intolerant political left.

Canceling Trump’s orders was a political and ideological priority for his successor.

In his first Oval Office hours — indeed, in his first executive order — President Biden declared his spiteful independence from the 1776 Commission, formally killing it.

Several weeks later, he revoked Trump’s other patriotic efforts.

Gone, but not forgotten. And, hopefully, like Trump, they’re now back.

Trump’s orders, with their themes of American greatness and their call for proud, physical manifestations of the country’s heritage, were, in their way, endorsed in the recent elections.

The people made clear their contempt for the wokeness inflicted upon them by Biden and the Democratic Party.

Come-uppance should arrive Jan. 20: Biden’s unpatriotic tit merits an emphatic MAGA tat.

On Day 1, as #47, Trump should reinstate his Biden-revoked efforts to reorient America to its roots.

Trump should revise and expand them as needed (his Advisory Commission did issue a powerful “1776 Report”), and in one case, he should make them, literally, monumental.

Trump’s powerful 2020 Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore shows him as a genuine champion of evocative public art.

His National Garden executive order —“America’s answer to this reckless attempt to erase our heroes, values and entire way of life” (and a de facto rejection of laughed-at, cultural elite connoisseurs who pay millions for duct-taped banana “art”) — is astonishing in its scope, calling for hundreds of statues of “a roll call of heroes who deserve honor, recognition and lasting tribute.”

It deserves a rebirth — and a major expansion.

A stone’s throw from the White House is Trump’s inspiration for what could and should be a new and inspiring American monument: A Soldier’s Journey, the recently unveiled World War I memorial.

The man who has proven he knows how to make American monuments great again is the bold artist, Sabin Howard, who designed and sculpted the shockingly epic, beautiful, colossal and utterly patriotic memorial to both the sacrifice to America’s warriors, as well as its destiny.

After generations of dull and ugly, of art for the artist’s sake, this exceptional and visionary artist — unembarrassed in his love for America and its promise of freedom — has gifted us with work emotive beauty, a thing packaged huge: His 60-foot-long, 10-foot-high, 38-figure movie in bronze, a result of a near-decade of relentless work, recalls the greatness of Michaelangelo and DaVinci.

It is art, as he says, for “We the People.”

Howard’s work has instigated the idea for another monument, of profound scale and import: a Grand Freedom Arch — what he calls “an American Exceptionalism Monument” — that would be a “hero’s journey” of America.

Echoing the kinetic-action and linked-scenes that make-up of his muscular and sinewy World War I bronze triumph, Howard envisions a masterpiece portraying the sweep of centuries, starting in 1776, arcing through the Revolution — giving prominence to the Liberty Bell’s raising — Civil War, emancipation and healing, industrialization, world wars, Great Depression, civil-rights movement and arriving at a New Frontier.

Not a conclusion but aspiring to a destiny that surely must be manifested.

The themes are Trump’s themes, and more so, America’s.

With its enormous size, Howard’s Grand Freedom Arch would elevate the observer, and the country.

Through its historic tableau, it would rebuke victimization while celebrating autonomy and self-determination, God and freedom, and the centrality of free will.

Trump and Howard — true Monuments Men — are a perfect combination to tell America’s compelling story.

It can start on Day 1.

Jack Fowler is a host of the Victor Davis Hanson Show