In June 2020, Campbell appeared on Breitbart News radio to respond to and defend Trump's use of the Veterans' Memorial Preservation Act, which Campbell had introduced while in the Senate in 2003, to defend American statues during the civil unrest. During the interview he voiced his disgust at the vandalizing of war memorials around the country, and also defended the statue of Andrew Jackson that had been targeted by rioters and vandals: "Leave it there, but tell the whole story. I don't think you can rewrite history to only tell your point of view. Seems to me, if we're really going to learn from history so that we don't make the same dumb mistakes, we must look at the bad things that happened at the same time...but to do away with it, I don't think it's the right thing. You know, you can't sanitize history by getting rid of all the symbols of oppression." Campbell compared the destruction of statues to the Taliban's destruction of cultural and religious sites, and said the law must be enforced to protect the monuments or otherwise, "We're in for a full-fledged insurrection if we don't stop it." He also condemned the violence in the 2020 protests: "A lot of this is driven by, in my view, people who are basically anarchists. They want to change our whole national structure, and a little bit of white guilt thrown in there, too. There's just a better way to do it if people don't want those statues to remain, because where does it end?" He concluded the interview by saying, "I think part of the learning process and teaching our kids is not to totally sanitize things by getting rid of the things that we didn't like from the old days. We need to explain it to our youngsters why the bad things happened."
