During Trump’s first term in office, from 2017 to 2021, the Puerto Rican Legislature proposed erecting a statue after he visited the island following Hurricane Maria. Some lawmakers did not agree in 2018.
Gov. Jenniffer González told POLITICO she’d work to have President Donald Trump’s statue on the ‘Paseo de los Presidentes’, in front of the capitol in San Juan.
“We are coordinating that…We don’t know when it will be done, but he deserves it,” González said.
Traditionally, the government of Puerto Rico has honored American presidents who have visited the island during their term in office with a statue on the promenade.
Some of the statues there are those of Herbert C. Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama, the last one to be added in 2012.
During Trump’s first term in office, from 2017 to 2021, the Puerto Rican Legislature proposed erecting a statue after he visited the island following Hurricane Maria. Some lawmakers did not agree in 2018.
Then, Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz, who holds the same position now, stated that there were no funds to create Trump’s statue and expressed an unfavorable opinion of the US president.
“I’m not much of a Trump supporter, and I don’t believe many Puerto Ricans are either. However, there’s an administrative order mandating that every president who has visited Puerto Rico be honored in that manner. That said, it’s not currently in the plans,” Rivera Schatz remarked at the time, as reported by Primera Hora.
The relationship between Puerto Rico and Trump has been contentious. During his visit to the island, amid the destruction caused by the Category 4 hurricane, he said that Puerto Rico had taken him out of the budget. He also created obstacles for the island to receive federal aid for the reconstruction, alleging that its government officials were corrupt.
Although he appealed to the Puerto Rican vote on the campaign trail, presenting local reggaeton singers, he did not apologize when comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” during one of his rallies.
