Here are Some of the ‘Beautiful Statues’ Donald Trump Says We Would ‘Greatly Miss’

President Donald Trump tripled down on his controversial reaction to the violence in Charlottesville, taking to Twitter Wednesday to decry the growing movement to remove Confederate statues and monuments.

Reasonable people can disagree on the best course of action for the nation’s Confederate memorials. A few months ago THE WEEKLY STANDARD suggested placing them in museums. But the president’s notion that they are all irreplaceable beauties is a stretch. Here are a few confederate monuments it would be an aesthetic mercy to mothball.

Thomas Jonathan Stonewall Jackson statue, Manassas National Battlefield Park, Virginia. Photo credit: Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty Images.

To kick things off, here’s a statue of Confederate general Thomas Jackson, better known as “Stonewall” for his reported fearlessness under fire at the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861. This statue stands on the site of that skirmish, at Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia.

Unfortunately, sculptor Joseph Pollia decided to portray Jackson’s courage and resolve by giving both him and his horse the beefcake treatment, every muscle bulging to an unhealthy degree. The general surveys the battlefield with the eyes of a man already thinking about his next protein shake. If the historical Jackson had taken this many roids, it wouldn’t have been bravery that made him stand like a stone wall. He would have been physically unable to duck the bullets.

Photo credit: Epics/Getty Images

This next statue, which stands in White Point Garden in Charleston, South Carolina, was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to commemorate the soldiers who defended Fort Sumter from 1861 to 1865. The statue is a textbook example of Jim Crow-era revisionism, portraying the Southern soldier, in the words of its sculptor, as “the stalwart youth, standing in front with sword and shield symbolizing by his attitude the defense not only of the fort, but also of the fair city behind the fort in which are his most prized possessions, wife and family.”

The saving grace of this statue, however, is its vagueness; if the South had actually marched into battle nude with sword and shield, the war would have ended almost immediately and Reconstruction would have been comparably painless. In fact, there’s nothing in the actual statue to flag it as a Confederate memorial at all. To sanitize this work, all it needs is a new base proclaiming it actually depicts a more broadly acceptable figure, like Hercules or Dwayne Johnson.

Nathan Bedford Forrest Photo credit: Brent Moore/Flickr

This statue, which sits beside an ugly stretch of interstate behind a chain-link fence in Nashville, is without doubt the holy grail of eyesore confederate monuments. The work depicts Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general whose dubious achievements include recruiting volunteer soldiers with the slogan “Come on boys, if you want a heap of fun and to kill some Yankees” and later becoming the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

The creator, Jack Kershaw, was decidedly an amateur sculptor (his full-time job was being a racist) and it shows. Forrest’s face is a death mask of bad taste; his glittering eyes are like a portal into a world where slavery is legal coast-to-coast and Nickelback covers of Dixieland tunes rule pop radio. And his unsettled expression suggests no one knows the statue’s horror better than the statue itself.

Of course, not every Confederate memorial attains to the dizzying aesthetic heights of these three. But they serve as a word of warning that our current president—no art enthusiast himself—may not be the most compelling voice on the merits of public sculpture or historic preservation.