Trump sails into a Columbus controversy

The TOI correspondent from Washington: US President Donald Trump is planning to install a statue of explorer Christopher Columbus on White House grounds in yet another move to reshape the nation’s historical narrative through a distinctly nativist MAGA lens that tangentially involves India. The decision, pending final logistical approvals, is the latest flashpoint in the cultural and political battle over how the United States understands its origins— a story some historians and critics say valorizes brigands and freebooters who plundered a “stolen land” but one Trump says is "heroic."

Born in Genoa, Italy, Columbus, funded by the Spanish monarchy, set out in 1492 not to discover a new continent, but to find a westward sea route to India and its riches. He believed—wrongly, because of flawed calculations that underestimated the Earth’s circumference by a quarter —that India lay just a few thousand miles west of Europe as he sought to circumvent the Ottoman controlled territory to reach India.

Instead, he landed in the Caribbean, while still convinced he had reached the outskirts of India. That mistake produced one of history’s enduring ironies: he referred to the Indigenous peoples he encountered as “Indians,” a misnomer rooted in error that persists in law and language to this day in the US, although Columbus never set foot on present day US.

The larger consequences of that error were immense. Columbus’s voyages opened the door to European colonisation of America, enslavement, and the catastrophic collapse of Indigenous Native American populations through disease and violence, some 250 years before the East India Company made inroads into India. By some accounts, some 50 million Native American people – 90 per cent of the population – were decimated, mostly from epidemics they were not immune to.

The Columbus sculpture that Trump is planning to install in the White House carries its own charged history. It is a reconstruction of a statue unveiled in Baltimore by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 and pulled down by protesters during the racial justice protests of 2020, before being dumped into the city’s Inner Harbor. As monuments across the country fell amid a broader reckoning with racism and colonialism, Columbus became a central target. A group of Italian American businessmen and politicians later recovered the damaged pieces, and rebuilt the statue with the help of local sculptors. The restored statue is now expected to be placed on the south side of the White House grounds.

For Trump, elevating Columbus is not merely an act of commemoration; it is a statement of defiance. During his first term and again on the 2024 campaign trail, he cast himself as a protector of figures he says embody American daring and greatness. In a 2021 executive order outlining his proposed National Garden of American Heroes, Trump included Columbus among those who exemplify “the American spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure.” Last October, he signed a proclamation hailing Columbus as “the original American hero” and reaffirming Columbus Day, a holiday some states have replaced with Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Not everyone agrees with this MAGA narrative. Historians like Howard Zinn have critiqued the founding and expansion of the US as one involving violent dispossession and colonisation of Indigenous lands, with colonisers taking over America through force, disease, and deception. Last week, the entertainer Billie Ellish outraged MAGA hardliners by lashing out against ICE and declaring “No one is illegal on stolen land” during her acceptance speech at the Grammy Awards.

Among other MAGA projects, Trump is also planning to build an arch that he has said will be bigger and better than India Gate in New Delhi and a ballroom in the reconstructed East Wing that will be larger than the White House itself.