Remington, an American Realist painter and sculptor of the “Old West,” never claimed that the Bronco Buster depicted Roosevelt and it doesn’t even look like the 26th president when you can examine it closely.

Advertisement

The statue simply shows an unnamed cowboy “breaking” a wild horse, a symbol of “taming” the American West and something closely associated with Roosevelt’s drive to colonize Indigenous land.

“Remington’s dynamic depiction of a cowboy breaking a wild horse also embodied Roosevelt’s vision of the westerner, whom he praised as a hardworking, self-reliant American hero,” the Met Museum explains on its website.

Advertisement

Several identical Bronco Buster sculptures were made in the preceding years, but the one that sits in the White House is an original cast that was donated by Virginia Hatfield and Louis Hatfield Stickney of Kentucky in 1973 during the Nixon presidency, according to the Gerald Ford Presidential Library.

The Bronco Buster, which belongs to the White House and not a single president, has sat in the Oval Office under multiple administrations, including the presidencies of George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, as you can see in the photos below.

Advertisement

The full interview with Trump is available on the Fox Nation website.

Trump went on to whine about the statues that have been taken down by protesters and municipalities across the U.S. during this summer’s uprising, first sparked by the killing of 46-year-old George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis on Memorial Day.

Advertisement

“The states... a lot of states are weak. A lot of people are weak. And they’re allowing it to happen,” Trump said of the statues that have been taken down across the country.

Ironically, Trump told Fox News that even if you don’t like the people being depicted in a statue, you can’t take that statue down because it’s vital for understanding history. He also complained that people who are tearing down statues actually have no idea who they’re tearing down and why they’re doing it. How does Trump know this? Because he can apparently read their confusion through the TV box.

Advertisement

“A lot of these people that want it down, don’t even know what they’re taking down. I watch them on television, and I see what’s happening. And they’re ripping down things, they have no idea what they’re ripping down,” Trump said.

But if Trump doesn’t even know what the statue that sits a few feet from his own desk represents, what good are statues for teaching history in public places?

Trump went on to say that it all started with Confederate statues and then moved on to Ulysses S. Grant and others. Trump even claimed that some protesters want to “take down Lincoln.”

Advertisement

Kilmeade tried to give Trump an opportunity to address the concerns of people who dislike living in a country with statues of slaveholders. Needless to say, Trump didn’t inspire confidence in anyone who’s against slavery.

“Since you have done a lot for the African-American community, what is your message to them who say, ‘my ancestors were enslaved because of their...’” Kilmeade asked.

Advertisement

“My message is that we have a great country. We have the greatest country on Earth,” Trump said. “We have a heritage, we have a history. We should learn from the history. And if you don’t understand your history, you’ll go back to it again. You will go right back to it. You have to learn. Think of it—take away that whole era, and you’ll go back to it sometime—people won’t know about it.”

Trump appears to be saying that if you don’t leave up statues of slaveholders then slavery will somehow become legal again in the United States. Or something. Who knows at this point?

Advertisement

President Trump, an unrepentant white supremacist who used to sleep with a book of Hitler speeches next to his bed in the 1980s, is going to continue with his attacks on protesters in defense of statues, especially if those statues represent history that can be better learned in books.