Donald Trump orders creation of 'national heroes' garden

US President Donald Trump has ordered the creation of a "National Garden of American Heroes" to defend what he calls "our great national story" against those who vandalise statues. His executive order gives a new task force 60 days to present plans, including a location, for the garden.
He insists the new statues must be lifelike, "not abstract or modernist".
A number of US statues have been pulled down since the police killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd in May. Monuments linked to the slave-owning Confederacy during the Civil War in America have been especially targeted in the nationwide protests ignited by the death of Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
President Trump has defended Confederate symbols as a part of American heritage.
In a speech to mark Independence Day at Mount Rushmore, he condemned the anti-racism protesters who toppled statues.
He said America's national heritage was being threatened - an emotive appeal for patriotism.
The garden - to be in a place of natural beauty near a city - is to be opened by 4 July 2026, Mr Trump's executive order says. State authorities and civic organisations are invited to donate statues for it.
President Trump's choice of historical figures to be commemorated in the garden is likely to be controversial.
The list of "historically significant" Americans includes Founding Fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but also frontiersman Davy Crockett, evangelical Christian preacher Billy Graham, Ronald Reagan and World War Two heroes Douglas MacArthur and George Patton.
There will also be statues of African-American abolitionist Harriet Tubman and civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King Jr.
Mr Trump also includes non-Americans who "made substantive historical contributions to the discovery, development, or independence of the future United States".
So the garden can have statues of Christopher Columbus, Junipero Serra and the Marquis de Lafayette.
Columbus and the Spanish Catholic missionary Serra are far from heroic for Native Americans, because their "discoveries" led to the enslavement and exploitation of indigenous people by white colonists.
There are no Native American or Hispanic individuals on the list, which also includes Republican presidents but no Democrats.
Historians interviewed by the Washington Post criticised the idea, with James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, saying the choices "vary from odd to probably inappropriate to provocative".