President Donald Trump has spent much of the past year on a renovation tear. He’s added gilding to the Oval Office, begun work on a massive ballroom after demolishing the East Wing and added a virtual copy of Mar-a-Lago’s patio on top of the Rose Garden. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Trump’s latest vision involves plans to install a statue of Christopher Columbus on the White House grounds.
A few things stand out from the decision to grant the Italian explorer’s stony visage a place of honor. The Columbus statue in question is a reconstruction of one that previously stood in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. President Ronald Reagan joined the city’s mayor in its unveiling at the statue’s dedication ceremony in 1984. Decades later, it was torn down and flung into the harbor, one of many statues depicting colonizers and/or racists removed around the country during the 2020 protests following the death of George Floyd.
A few things stand out from the decision to grant the Italian explorer’s stony visage a place of honor.
The statute didn’t remain submerged for long before a local fisherman, Tilghman Hemsley, hired a dive crew to fish it out. By 2022, his son, artist Will Hemsley, had finished a recreation based on 3D scans of the original. Among the main supporters of the project was Bill Martin, a leader with the group that organized Baltimore’s Columbus Day parade. Martin told the Star Democrat in 2022 that the Interior Department had considered including the rebuilt statue in the “National Garden of American Heroes” that Trump proposed toward the end of his first term.
Trump’s loss in 2020 meant his sculpture garden vision never came to fruition, leaving the Columbus statue without a home. But its relocation to the White House has apparently been in the works for months. WBFF, a local Fox station, reported last October that the statue was meant to arrive in Washington before Columbus Day, but was delayed due to Trump’s trip to the Middle East.
Instead, Trump signed a Columbus Day proclamation fulling his promise months earlier to bring the holiday “back from the ashes.” In doing so, he demoted Indigenous Peoples Day from the shared spotlight it had only briefly enjoyed as a federal holiday. Trump was so proud of this supposed achievement that he suggested it might influence the midterm elections during his (even more rambling than usual) press briefing last month:
Officially reinstated Columbus Day. I like the name Columbus Day. The Italian people are very happy about it. Remember when you go to the voting booths, I reinstated Columbus Day. That was an easy one, Christopher Columbus.
The idea that Italian American voters might be influenced is itself a form of racial grievance politics that Trump would never directly acknowledge. Protestors targeted the statue due to Columbus’ role in launching a campaign of slavery and genocide against the native Taino people in the Caribbean. Restoring Columbus to a place of honor in the American pantheon is part and parcel with the rewrite of history and takeover of cultural institutions that are so important to the administration.
Ironically enough, if the origins of the holiday were recreated today, the Trump administration would likely dub it “woke.”
Ironically enough, if the origins of the holiday were recreated today, the Trump administration would likely dub it “woke.” The first Columbus Day declaration came in 1892, during the 400-year anniversary of his landing on Hispaniola and at a time when Italians hadn’t been folded into America’s dominant white power structures. (Just one year earlier had seen the lynching of 11 Sicilian immigrants in New Orleans, a testament to how much closer in status Italians were to Black Americans.) Over the years, promoting the holiday became a way for the Italian community to better write themselves into the American story.
There’s another fun twist, given the war on arts spending underway within the administration: A major chunk of the roughly $100,000 price tag artist Hemsley cited came from taxpayer dollars. Back in Nov. 2020, the National Endowment for the Humanities provided a $30,000 grant to Martin’s group, Columbus Celebrations Inc., to help pay for the statue’s reconstruction. While other private donors contributed, without public support for the arts, this project might not have been completed.
Trump is nothing if not deeply transactional, even when the deal he’s offering makes sense to no one else. But despite his suggestion otherwise, it’s hard to see how the Columbus statue could sway the midterms. What it does is highlight how much focus Trump has dedicated to everything but materially helping Americans. Nobody will be better off once the statue is in place at the White House, but Trump clearly believes that a small number of people might feel better enough to vote for a Republican this fall.
