WASHINGTON — President Trump’s White House hailed the removal of Black Lives Matter Plaza this week as a “step in the right direction,” and dissed the multimillion dollar display as a divisive “relic” to left wing radicals.
Construction crews started breaking up the road outside the executive mansion on Monday after a Republican bill led by Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) ordered DC’s government to junk the mural and rename the plaza — or risk losing federal funding.
“D.C.’s Black Lives Matter Plaza was an eyesore of a virtue signal that did nothing to better the lives of black Americans in our nation’s capital,” White House spokesman Harrison Fields told The Post.
“President Trump campaigned on cleaning up Washington, D.C., and this is a major step in the right direction.”
Trump recently posted a video on Truth Social showing construction crews jackhammering away at the hazard yellow letters painted over 16th Avenue, but hasn’t yet commented on the rebranding of the plaza.
After the removal is completed, the stretch of street leading up to the White House, will be renamed “Liberty Plaza.”
The $610,000, two-month-long project was inspired by Trump’s promise to “clean up Washington, DC,” Clyde said.
“BLM is a radical, defund-the-police organization — but we are not a defund-the-police nation. Yet the left has allowed this deeply divisive slogan to shamefully stain the streets of America’s capital city for nearly five years,” he added.
He continued: “It’s past time for Congress to exercise its constitutional authority over Washington’s affairs to remove BLM Plaza and rename the street to Liberty Plaza. Our capital city must serve as a beacon of freedom, patriotism, and safety — not wokeness, divisiveness, and lawlessness.”
The “Black Lives Matter” mural cost the city $4.8 million to construct, with an additional $3 million used to put benches, signage and other pedestrian tools nearby, Mayor Muriel Bowser said in 2021 when work began on it.
The plaza was expected to be “permanent” and “serve as a safe gathering space for pedestrians wanting to fully experience the mural’s impact,” she said.
Bowser led the effort to construct the two-block pedestrian space in 2020 after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed by police officers, but didn’t put up a fight after Republicans voted to take it down.
“The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference. The devastating impacts of the federal job cuts must be our number one concern,” Bowser claimed on X.
She said the nation’s capital has “bigger fish to fry” than protest the takedown of the mural — such as focusing on the economy.
Trump has spoken out about the possibility of the federal government taking over DC.
“I think we should take over Washington, DC — make it safe,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One in February.
The president has also said he directed Bowser to clean up homeless encampments around the city — or face federal intervention.
“We have notified the Mayor of Washington, D.C., that she must clean up all of the unsightly homeless encampments in the City, specifically including the ones outside of the State Department, and near the White House,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“If she is not capable of doing so, we will be forced to do it for her! Washington, D.C. must become CLEAN and SAFE!”
