Texas billionaire with Nazi art collection lends sculptures to White House

Since returning to the White House in 2025, President Donald Trump has sought to remake Washington D.C. So far, he's demolished the White House's East Wing to make way for a new ballroom, redecorated the Oval Office and proposed a gigantic arch. For one of Trump's more ambitious projects, he's enlisted the help of a prominent conservative Texan and art collector.

In 2020, at the end of his first term, Trump proposed a "National Garden of American Heroes" filled with around 250 statues of a really bizarre smattering of figures from American history. The list includes a wide array of unobjectionable figures from American history and culture: Neil Armstrong, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Elvis Presley, Samuel Adams, Paul Revere and Francis Scott Key. Texans like Davy Crockett and Barbara Jordan would be included, as would various conservative luminaries like Milton Friedman, Barry Goldwater, and William F. Buckley. Athletes, singers, artists and civil rights figures would all get a statue. So, somewhat baffingly, would the late Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, who was born in Canada. In May, Trump announced he would put the garden on a spot near D.C.'s West Potomac Park. A preservation group has stalled that plan, at least for now. 

n the meantime, Trump is getting his statue fix putting sculptures of founding fathers in the historic White House Rose Garden. Last week, Trump put up a statue of Thomas Jefferson, as first reported by The Washington Post. Jefferson became the fifth statue Trump installed. The others came from an intriguing source: Dallas conservative activist, real estate developer and art collector Harlan Crow, perhaps most famous for his extremely close relationship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. 

According to reporting from The Washington Post, Crow loaned the White House statues of founding fathers Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton and "Freedom's Charge," a statue dedicated to Revolutionary War soldiers. The sculptures were installed  Old Parkland, his corporate office campus in North Dallas where his company, Crow Holdings, operates. Crow has also hosted various meetings of conservative thinkers at the campus as well as the first-ever classes of the anti-woke University of Austin.

A spokesperson for Crow confirmed the loan to The Washington Post. Crow Holdings did not immediately respond to Chron's request for comment. 

Crow, whose father Trammell was once described by Forbes as the "largest landlord in the United States," first came into the public consciousness in 2023 after ProPublica revealed that Crow had been lavishing Thomas with gifts. That included a Bible once owned by Fredrick Douglass (also a Garden of Heroes honoree) and various trips on Crow's yacht. That prompted scrutiny of Crow's extensive art collection, hosted both at Old Parkland and his $55 million home in Dallas' Highland Park neighborhood. 

In his backyard, Crow has erected what he calls the "Garden of Evil," a statue garden filled with renditions and busts of "deposed dictators. There's the heavyweights: Stalin, Lenin, Mao and a Castro. But Crow also has busts of deeper cut despots such as Hosni Mubarak, Josip Broz Tito, Nicolae Ceausescu, Walter Ulbricht, Che Guevara. He also has a statue of Gavrilo Princip, the guy who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914. In 2003 Crow told the New York Times that he enlisted a fixer named Tie Sosnowski to procure many of these statues, including a harrowing adventure to the nation of Georgia in 1992 to get Crow a statue of Lenin that was toppled by crowds celebrating the fall of the Soviet Union. 

"You see all these kids wearing Che T-shirts," Crow told the Dallas Morning News during a tour of his home in 2014. "I don't think they know who he is. He is a killer, a murderer."

Other statues owned by Crow include former British Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill, people he told the Dallas Morning News he admires.

Besides his sculpture collection, Crow came under fire during the Thomas gift revelations for owning several objects related to Adolf Hitler. Crow owns a slew of Nazi artifacts, including linens with the eagle and swastika emblem used by the Nazi Party, various medals and a copy of "Mein Kampf" signed by Hitler himself. 

Among his collection of paintings that includes works by Rembrandt and Monet, Crow has two paintings of European cityscapes from Hitler's ill-fated art career. A person  who attended a gathering at his home told Washingtonian that Hitler's pieces stood out, with art by George W. Bush "next to a Norman Rockwell next to one by Hitler." According to various sources, Crow said he collects this stuff because "he hates communism and fascism."

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