Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has issued a sharp defense of the Trump administration’s cultural agenda, framing the recent installation of a Caesar Rodney statue in Washington, D.C., as a pivotal victory in a broader “cultural war.”
In a Tuesday op-ed, Gingrich argued that the movement to restore monuments is a necessary correction to what he describes as “antipatriotic” forces seeking to dismantle American heritage.
The centerpiece of Gingrich’s argument is the statue of Caesar Rodney, a Delaware delegate to the Continental Congress. The monument stood in Wilmington, Delaware, for nearly a century before being removed in June 2020 by order of the city’s mayor during a period of national civil unrest.
Gingrich noted that the statue has now been unveiled in Freedom Plaza near the Willard Hotel, a move he claims restores a “hero to his rightful place.”
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Gingrich focused heavily on the historical significance of Rodney, who famously rode 80 miles through a thunderstorm while suffering from cancer and asthma to cast the deciding vote for the Declaration of Independence. The op-ed highlighted a perceived irony in the political handling of the figure:
“Biden was running for president and didn’t want to fight with the leftwing that dominates the Democratic Party. So, he remained quiet while the most famous statue in Delaware was taken away.”
This silence, Gingrich pointed out, stood in contrast to a 1974 entry in the Congressional Record where then-Senator Biden praised Rodney as a “great patriot.”
The core of Gingrich’s critique targets “presentism”—the practice of judging historical figures by modern moral standards. He argued that the “fanatical purity” of modern activists results in the disqualification of any figure who owned slaves, regardless of their contributions to democracy.
Gingrich warned that if this trend continues, the list of exclusions will become “endless,” moving from slave ownership to views on suffrage and eventually gender identity.
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“To apply today’s values to disqualify honoring Washington would be a behavior worthy of a high school freshman but unworthy of learned adults,” Gingrich wrote. He asserted that President Trump views the battle over these cultural symbols as more significant than typical administrative reorganization, characterizing it as a struggle to keep the “seeds for modern democracy” from being erased.
According to Gingrich, the placement of the Rodney statue is merely a “down payment” on a larger effort to populate the National Garden of American Heroes and reassert the virtues of American history against a backdrop of what he calls “antihistorical” distortion.
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