| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. I recently made some fun of Donald Trump's idea of a garden of American heroes, but I don't dislike the basic idea. Honoring greatness is a fine thing to do, even if our ideas about it will always be somewhat arbitrary and contested. Trump's vision was a bit odd, to be sure. His list of great Americans sounded like something Walt Disney might've proposed in 1953, plus a few civil-rights pioneers and a conservative movement leader or two. Thus you get Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, along with Harriet Tubman and Ronald Reagan. You also get only two women born after 1822. Then there's Trump's aesthetic: He wants a garden of "lifelike or realistic representations" with nothing "abstract or modernist," which sounds like a rather authoritarian demand coming from a president. And the whole thing was yet another example of Trump using an "executive order" as more of a press release than anything else. Any such project would normally need to be authorized and funded by Congress. Despite those objections, I liked the general concept. But as I thought about how many great Americans I'd want to celebrate — Hubert Humphrey! Shirley Chisholm! Howard Baker! Margaret Chase Smith! Katharine Hepburn! Charles Mingus! Ella Fitzgerald! Babe Ruth! Emily Dickinson! — I quickly realized the idea just doesn't work in practice. Any group of heroes large enough to really stand for the United States of America is too big to make into a statue garden. After all, how can you choose among Chief Justice John Marshall, General George Marshall, or Justice Thurgood Marshall? Why would you want a format that forces you to? Here's the twist. After spending a while thinking about all of this, I realized that what Trump wants is actually something we already have: the National Portrait Gallery, a Smithsonian museum in Washington. Check out, for example, their new acquisitions. It's a group that includes Nobel Prize-winning chemist Frances Arnold, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Earth, Wind & Fire, Wilma Rudolph, Philip Glass, and more. The gallery of American presidents is perhaps the museum's best-known exhibit, and I'm a big fan of The Four Justices, but there's plenty more, including a wonderful group of sports champions that I suspect Trump himself might enjoy. The National Portrait Gallery isn't quite what the president is envisioning, of course. But for representing the United States, I'd argue that it's a whole lot better. The sense that I have when I spend a few hours there is of the richness and variety of what citizens of the republic are capable of. It isn't a definitive collection of great moral exemplars, as Trump's version would have it. Nor does it pretend to be. Instead, it allows us to see the greatness of the nation through the achievements as well as the flaws in hundreds of people who were extraordinary in some way. The overall effect, to me at least, is always to feel a burst of patriotism. Sooner or later we'll be able to travel again, and when I make it to Washington, I'll probably find time to stop in at the gallery. Perhaps Trump should give it a try. 1. Lara Putnam, Jeremy Pressman and Erica Chenoweth on the size of the Black Lives Matter protests — and how deeply they reach into different parts on the nation. 2. Meredith Conroy on the Republican Party's success in nominating women for office. 3. Dan Drezner on Trump's Mount Rushmore speech. 4. Amy Walter on Trump's re-election prospects. 5. Henry Olsen on the dangers to Republicans up and down the ballot. 6. Philip Gordon on Trump's China policy. 7. Megan McArdle on workarounds in the time of the coronavirus. 8. Jean Parvin Bordewich is thinking ahead to the presidential inauguration in January, and how to make it meaningful if the pandemic prevents traditional festivities. 9. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Timothy L. O'Brien on Mary Trump's book. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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