Trump opposed to removing Theodore Roosevelt's statue from outside
Museum of Natural History
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[June 22, 2020]
By Kanishka Singh
(Reuters) - President Donald Trump said on
Monday he opposed removing the towering statue of Theodore Roosevelt
from outside New York City's American Museum of Natural History.
The move was announced by the museum on Sunday and comes amid
anti-racism protests across the United States and the world after the
death of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, in police custody on May 25
in the United States.
The statue shows Roosevelt on a horse, with a Native American man and an
African man by his side. It stands prominently on a plinth outside the
museum's main entrance, overlooking Central Park.
Roosevelt, a Republican like Trump, was U.S. president from 1901-1909.
Known for his exuberant and daring manner, he carried out antitrust,
conservationist and "Square Deal" reforms, and, critics said, took an
interventionist approach to foreign policy, including projecting U.S.
naval power around the world.
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Many critics have said the Roosevelt statue symbolizes racial
discrimination and colonial expansion.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Sunday that the city was in
favor of the request from the museum to remove the statue because it
"depicts black and indigenous people as subjugated and racially
inferior."
"Ridiculous, don't do it," Trump said in a tweet on Monday .
In the ongoing ant-racism demonstrations, protesters across the United
States and around the world have demanded that authorities take down
monuments honoring pro-slavery Confederate figures and the architects of
Europe's colonies.
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![](../images/062220pics/news_d7.jpg)
A portrait of former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt hangs in the
background as President Donald Trump delivers remarks in the
Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, U.S., April 12,
2019. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
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"Simply put, the time has come to move it," the museum's president,
Ellen Futter, told the New York Times .
She said the museum's decision was based on the statue itself, along
with its "hierarchical composition", and not on Roosevelt. Futter
said the museum continues to honor Roosevelt as "a pioneering
conservationist".
Roosevelt's face is also one of the four presidents - along with
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln - whose
faces are cast in 60-foot-high granite sculptures at the Mount
Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota.
Trump has blasted the anti-racism protests, saying demonstrators
have behaved badly.
"The unhinged left-wing mob is trying to vandalize our history,
desecrate our monuments - our beautiful monuments - tear down our
statues and punish, cancel and persecute anyone who does not conform
to their demands for absolute and total control. We're not
conforming", the U.S. president told supporters at a rally last
week.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru Editing by Gerry Doyle,
Toby Chopra and Mark Heinrich)
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