What evidence do you have that the administration had anything to do with shutting down monuments? Something like that is at the discretion of the director of a given federal agency. Now maybe the director of the National Park Service decided that he was going to shut monuments down as a matter of politics, but you have to recognize that there are good reasons to do so.
In DC in the last year we had a vandal deface the Lincoln Memorial and the National Cathedral. If during the shutdown the National Park Service just left all of the monuments unguarded and someone took a hammer to the nose of a statue of Jefferson, that'd be a humongous price to pay. In a national park, without park rangers to rescue people, if someone got themselves into trouble and died, that would be worse than ruining some people's vacations.
It is possible that the White House ordered parks and monuments closed for political reasons, but that's all speculation at this point. No different than speculating that George W. Bush allowed 9/11 to happen to justify invading Iraq.
In DC in the last year we had a vandal deface the Lincoln Memorial and the National Cathedral. If during the shutdown the National Park Service just left all of the monuments unguarded and someone took a hammer to the nose of a statue of Jefferson, that'd be a humongous price to pay. In a national park, without park rangers to rescue people, if someone got themselves into trouble and died, that would be worse than ruining some people's vacations.
It is possible that the White House ordered parks and monuments closed for political reasons, but that's all speculation at this point. No different than speculating that George W. Bush allowed 9/11 to happen to justify invading Iraq.