By Bill McCarthy -
PolitiFact
During a campaign event, President Donald Trump attacked the Mayor of Washington, DC, Muriel Bowser, and wrongly accused her of recommending that the capital get rid of two of its most iconic monuments.
“We have a mayor in Washington who created a committee with recommendations,” Trump said Oct. 24 in Circleville, Ohio, “her recommendation is: tear down the Washington Monument, close the Lincoln Memorial.
Nerd.
Is seriously.
You can read about it ”.
“I said, 'No, thank you.
No thanks.
No, thank you, Madam Mayor.
We are going to keep the Washington Monument as it is. '
This people.
These people are crazy ”, added the president.
Trump misrepresented the recommendations of a city commission that over the summer reviewed the names with which more than 1,300 schools, buildings, parks, streets, public spaces and monuments in the capital have been baptized.
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The group suggested that the city rename some of its properties, many times because the people for whom they were named have connections to slavery, systemic racism or other forms of social injustice.
The group also asked Bowser to urge the federal government to "remove, relocate, or put into context" eight federal statues and monuments, including the Washington Monument.
But Bowser never recommended that the city "tear down" the Washington Monument or "close" the Lincoln Memorial.
The latter was not even mentioned in the commission's report, which has since been edited to erase recommendations on federal property.
Both monuments are located on the National Esplanade and on federal land, making them out of Bowser's control.
Removing them would require Congress to act, according to the DCist website.
Neither the mayor's office nor the Trump campaign responded to our questions in this regard.
Bowser did not support removing the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial
Bowser met the group in July after protests in the capital and elsewhere over the death of George Floyd, a black man from Minneapolis, at the hands of police in May.
The purpose of the commission, Bowser said on Twitter, was to make sure that the legacies of people who have been honored by naming buildings or other public spaces were consistent with the city's values.
In a 24-page report released in September, the commission outlined whether certain city-owned facilities should be "taken down, renamed or put into context."
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The group mainly looked at whether the people for whom these places were named had “significant disqualifying stories,” such as having participated in the slave trade, systemic racism or mistreatment of minority groups.
It concluded that the city could rename 21 public schools, nine residential buildings and campuses, 12 parks and gardens, and seven government buildings.
But what is relevant to Trump's claim is that the commission also recommended that Bowser use his position on the Capital Advisory Committee on Monuments to urge the federal government to "remove, relocate, or put into context" eight federal properties.
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The report did not specify what it was recommending for each of the properties on the list, which included iconic city landmarks such as the Jefferson and Washington monuments, both named after presidents who owned slaves.
But the publication of the report was criticized by the White House and by allies of the president, some of whom misrepresented the intentions of the report and claimed that it sought to remove the Washington monument, according to The Washington Post.
To avoid confusion, Bowser removed a page from the report, deleting the page that referenced federal properties.
LaToya Foster, a spokeswoman for Bowser's office, told the newspaper that the commission's proposal for federal properties was "to put them in context, not take them away."
"Mayor Bowser has asked (the commission) to clarify and refine her recommendations so that they focus on local Washington issues," Foster said, according to the newspaper.
"What I expected from the report is that it did not include recommendations on federal buildings," Bowser said at a press conference on Sept. 3.
"When I saw the final report, and could immediately see how their recommendations could easily be misinterpreted or misrepresented, we deleted them there."
The organizations FactCheck.org, Associated Press and USA Today had already denied social media posts that, like Trump, wrongly accused Bowser of supporting the removal of the Washington Monument.
Our rating
Trump said: “We have a mayor in Washington who created a commission with recommendations.
His recommendation is: tear down the Washington Monument, close the Lincoln Memorial.
Nerd.
Is seriously".
Bowser has not called for either of those two monuments to be torn down.
A commission report he established in July did recommend urging the federal government to "remove, relocate, or put in context" the Washington Monument, but not the Lincoln Memorial.
But the mayor had the references made in the report to federal monuments deleted, and her office quickly clarified that the commission's request was "to put them in context, not remove them."
Therefore, we characterize Trump's claim as
misleading.
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