Trump officials reinstating 2 Confederate monuments

Workers remove Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery in 2023

(Image credit: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades / For The Washington Post via Getty Images)

published 8 August 2025

What happened

The Trump administration said it will restore and reinstall two Civil War monuments: a statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike in Washington, D.C., that protesters toppled and burned in 2020, and a Confederate memorial removed from Arlington National Cemetery in 2023 on the advice of a bipartisan commission established by Congress.

Who said what

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday he was "proud to announce" that the 32-foot bronze monument created in 1914 by Confederate veteran Moses Ezekiel and commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy would be "rightfully returned" to Arlington. "It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings," he added. "Unlike the left, we don't believe in erasing American history — we honor it."

Retired Army Brig. Gen. Ty Seidule, the vice chair of the congressional Naming Commission, told the Post that removing the monument was "not some woke thing" and restoring it was "just wrong." The monument is "the cruelest I've ever seen because it's a pro-slavery, pro-segregation, anti-United States monument," he said. "It's meant to say that the white South was right and the United States of America was wrong."

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What next?

Returning the Confederate memorial to Arlington, from a museum in Virginia, will take two years and cost roughly $10 million, a U.S. Army official told The Associated Press.

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.