Trump Erects Contentious Columbus Statue Outside White House
The original was among dozens of Columbus monuments toppled in 2020 during nationwide protests against racial violence.
Following through on last month's revelation, President Trump installed a statue of Christopher Columbus in the White House compound on Sunday morning, March 22. The move reinforces Trump's proclamations to reinstate Columbus Day — despite its continued status as a federal holiday — and maintain the Genoese voyager's identity as a point of pride for the Italian American community in spite of Columbus's documented brutality toward Native people.
The sculpture was erected outside the Eisenhower Executive Office building on White House grounds, standing on a plinth that calls Columbus the “Discoverer of America.” The work is a replica of the original that once stood in Baltimore's Little Italy from 1984, when it was unveiled by President Ronald Reagan, until 2020, when protestors mobilizing around the killing of George Floyd toppled it over and dumped it in the Inner Harbor.
It was one of more than 30 other statues dedicated to Columbus that were toppled or decommissioned from 2020 to 2021 in acknowledgment of the voyager's legacy of violence and colonial extraction. Historical records show that Columbus abused, enslaved, and killed Native people in mass numbers and contributed to the spread of diseases that decimated Indigenous groups.
Within days of its removal during a July 4, 2020, protest, local Italian American coalition leaders hired divers to retrieve the statue's pieces from the harbor, and a local sculptor named Tilghman Hemsley and his son, Will, took in the damaged work for restoration. In addition to fundraising by the Italian American Organizations United (IAOU), the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded $30,000 in October 2020 for the sculpture's restoration project, which facilitated the Hemsleys' creation of two replica statues.
Though a new Columbus statue was never installed in Baltimore's Little Italy or elsewhere over fears of further vandalism and backlash, the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations (COPOMIAO) and the IAOU gifted one of the sculptures to the White House in 2025 for inclusion in the Trump administration's America 250 celebrations coming up this July.
“Christopher Columbus was the original American hero and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the Earth,” Trump wrote in a letter to COPOMIAO regarding the sculpture's installation on Sunday.
The administration's controversial celebration of Columbus comes amid Trump's sweeping efforts to misrepresent US history through various executive orders uplifting what the president terms “American exceptionalism.”
After shuttering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices across all federal agencies last year, Trump took aim at the Smithsonian Institution's museums in an executive order demanding a complete internal review to identify “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” He noted in a Truth Social post that the Smithsonian should focus less on “how bad slavery was” and “how horrible our country is.”
Prior to the Columbus statue's enshrinement on White House grounds, the National Park Service (NPS) had already acted on the administration's orders to retell American history.
After removing the words “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall Monument's onsite information plaques in Manhattan and its official website last November, the agency also took down a rainbow Pride flag at the historic park. In January, NPS also removed an outdoor exhibition about the legacy of slavery from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.
