‘Committing a war crime’: Of all the statues to honor, the Trump admin just restored a Confederate general who ‘resigned in disgrace’

The Trump administration has officially reinstalled the controversial Confederate General Albert Pike statue in Washington, D.C., five years after it was toppled by demonstrators during the 2020 racial justice protests. The 11-foot-tall bronze statue which sits on a 16-foot granite pedestal, was put back up near Judiciary Square over the past weekend.

The statue was pulled down with ropes, vandalized, and set on fire on June 19, 2020, as a wave of protests demanding racial justice swept the nation following George Floyd’s murder.. To many, the Confederate statue was a symbol of systemic racism, and for years, its presence in the nation’s capital had been a sore spot. It had been sitting in storage since then, but now, it’s back, all thanks to an effort stemming from Trump’s 2025 executive orders.

These orders, titled “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” and “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directed federal agencies like the National Park Service (NPS) to restore and safeguard historic monuments damaged during the protests. The NPS, for its part, simply said the restoration “aligns with federal responsibilities under historic-preservation law and recent executive orders to beautify the nation’s capital and restore pre-existing statues.”

Trump seems to love statues of racist generals who rebelled against the United States

But here’s the kicker: of all the figures to champion and spend federal money restoring, they picked Albert Pike. To be fair, he was known as one of the most influential figures in the history of American Freemasonry, which is why the statue was funded by the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry and erected in 1901 to honor his Masonic scholarship.

The statue itself depicts Pike in Masonic clothing, not his Confederate uniform, holding a book thought to be his work, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Pike was also a Confederate brigadier general during the Civil War, and this memorial is the only outdoor statue in D.C. that honors a Confederate general. Opposition to this statue goes back over a century, with Union veterans opposing its installation from the start.

This move has been met with a firestorm of controversy, and D.C.’s Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has been trying to get this thing removed permanently for years, absolutely slammed the decision. She didn’t mince words, calling the reinstallation a “morally objectionable move” and “an affront to the mostly Black and Brown residents of the District of Columbia and offensive to members of the military who serve honorably.”

It’s her comments about the man himself that really drive home how awful this decision is. This isn’t just about the Confederacy; this is about a genuinely dishonorable figure. She points out that Pike was not only a Confederate general who “took up arms against the United States,” but his service was stained by corruption and alleged violence.

Norton noted that “Pike himself served dishonorably. He took up arms against the United States, misappropriated funds, and was ultimately captured and imprisoned by his own troops.” She then delivered the devastating punchline: “He resigned in disgrace after committing a war crime and dishonoring even his own Confederate military service.” I honestly can’t believe anyone would argue for a statue of a person who literally resigned in disgrace after committing a war crime.