Trump installs Christopher Columbus statue on White House grounds

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Source: Washington Post

Trump installs Christopher Columbus statue on White House grounds

The president has condemned efforts to take down statues of Columbus and other historical figures, saying the removals are an "assault on our collective national memory."

March 22, 2026 at 5:55 p.m. EDT


A newly installed statue of Christopher Columbus stands outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Sunday. (Dan Diamond/The Washington Post)

By Dan Diamond and Olivia George

President Donald Trump has installed a statue of Christopher Columbus on the White House grounds, his latest effort to remake the presidential campus and celebrate the famed and controversial explorer.

{paywall}

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/22/white-house-christopher-columbus-statue/

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/dan-diamond/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/olivia-george/

Feb 4
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143611547
Trump taking steps toward installing a Columbus statue near the White House

Feb 4
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220996062
Trump's latest White House remake? Adding a Christopher Columbus statue to the grounds

[walkingman]

1. Every single day it is something....if this is what Trump and his minions consider

running the government like a business, I wouldn't have anything to do with that business. Is it any wonder that Trump has failed at everything he has ever done in his personal life?

Sadly he discovered that getting involved in politics is probably the most lucrative business in America - you can lie, cheat, steal and there is nothing that anyone can do to you.

I hate to say it but America sucks these days, absolutely sucks.

[twodogsbarking]

2. Robert E Lee and Hitler may be next. Sound absurd? Not sure.

[littlemissmartypants]

3. Will he make everyone pay to visit his "garden" for our 250...

Or is he just shaking down the oligarchy?

[usonian]

4. Just to inform: Who knows the origin of Columbus Day? (repost) It's not exactly what people think based on folklore.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=20708526

You see, "Columbus Day" was a means, not an end. It actually helped end racist immigration restrictions in 1965.

Of course, facts always get tossed out the window in politics. Simplistic (non) thinking prevails.


How Italians Became ‘White’
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbus-day-italian-american-racism.html
Vicious bigotry, reluctant acceptance: an American story.

11 Italian-Americans were lynched by a mob in New Orleans. You know, "dirty immigrants"

President Harrison would have ignored the New Orleans carnage had the victims been black. But the Italian government made that impossible. It broke off diplomatic relations and demanded an indemnity that the Harrison administration paid. Harrison even called on Congress in his 1891 State of the Union to protect foreign nationals — though not black Americans — from mob violence.

Harrison’s Columbus Day proclamation in 1892 opened the door for Italian-Americans to write themselves into the American origin story, in a fashion that piled myth upon myth. As the historian Danielle Battisti shows in “Whom We Shall Welcome,” they rewrote history by casting Columbus as “the first immigrant” — even though he never set foot in North America and never immigrated anywhere (except possibly to Spain), and even though the United States did not exist as a nation during his 15th-century voyage.


Snip

The New Orleans lynching solidified a defamatory view of Italians generally, and Sicilians in particular, as irredeemable criminals who represented a danger to the nation. The influential anti-immigrant racist Representative Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, soon to join the United States Senate, quickly appropriated the event. He argued that a lack of confidence in juries, not mob violence, had been the real problem in New Orleans. “Lawlessness and lynching are evil things,” he wrote, “but a popular belief that juries cannot be trusted is even worse.”

Facts aside, Lodge argued, beliefs about immigrants were in themselves sufficient to warrant higher barriers to immigration. Congress ratified that notion during the 1920s, curtailing Italian immigration on racial grounds, even though Italians were legally white, with all of the rights whiteness entailed. Italian-Americans labored in the campaign that overturned racist immigration restrictions in 1965

🇮🇹

[Deminpenn]

17. Family used to joke

about not really being white people. Pretty sure ours wasn't the only Italian heritage family to do so.

[usonian]

18. It cuts both ways.

I am glad not to be whitebread.

A former girlfriend was reading a book, I think it was a predecessor to "Personal Color", and commented that she was so jealous that everything matched olive skin. ( well, sort of)

And also glad not to be an Oompa Loompa. 🍊

[Deminpenn]

19. It does

That was a time when immigrants wanted more than anything not to be "outsiders" or "different". The cultures of my heritage were passed down in family functions and gatherings, but the languages were lost in less than a generation becaise parents wanted to "fit in" and speak English. No kid wanted to be called, take your pick of insulting ethnic slurs. Always makes me sad that I can't at least understand the languages my grandparents spoke.

[DenaliDemocrat]

21. My good friend used to say

They call you friend to your face, but don’t believe they aren’t calling you a dirty W@P behind your back.

They mocked our food. They forbid our languages. They interned our grandparents during WWII.

Even today, the people who gave us the greatest artists, incredible scientists, chocolate as we know it, and incredible architecture can only be represented as thugs by Hollywood.

[Deminpenn]

24. Without Passort

is what I;ve always understood W-P to stand for. There's also the joke about why so many Italians are named Tony (the subway signs read To NY). And, I know it's because Anthony is Catholic saint, not the signage.

But many white eastern European ethnic immigrants faced discrimination, too

[DenaliDemocrat]

25. Yeah, but Congress didn't pass a law

That forbade their immigration.

And I believe il guapo was the origin of the slur.

Anti-Italian sentiment is allowed here on DU. When Scaramucci was appointed, the Italian jokes flowed like maple syrup around here. Mods did nothing except pass out hides for those of us calling out the “jokes” as racism.

[Deminpenn]

30. I'm not offended

But, jmho, all this angst over statues isn't productive.

[littlemissmartypants]

5. No Paywall. You're welcome, mkj.

https://archive.is/2026.03.22-221752/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/22/white-house-christopher-columbus-statue/

[Permanut]

6. That would be the Christopher Columbus who discovered nothing..

And who was an evil human being.

He'd fit right in with the Trump cult today.

[GreenWave]

10. He may need a rewrite.

Marigalante was his blasphemous nickname for La Santa Maria but the one in question wasn't concerned as he was a whore monger and Maria in all her glory pleased him. On his second voyage he did have a Marigalante officially.
And after his return from the first voyage he did not go straight back to "Spain" as a good doggie. Instead he tried to strike a deal with "Portugal". This will force the Pope to draw the Line of Demarcation.
Interesting that in the Royal Court in Madrid a delegation was from Genoa and they knew him not. No evidence he wrote in Italian, but in the dialect of Barcelona where he had a residence.

Has a lot in common with Trump. Drumpf Columbus (Colom?)

[El Supremo]

11. Just like Trump...

Didn't know where he was going. Didn't know where he was when he got there . And never realized where he had been. Also went bankrupt.

[danieljsf]

7. White House Grounds?

Since when is the Eisenhower Executive Building on "White House grounds"?

[mopinko]

12. that's what i was wondering.

sloppy slop.

[underpants]

8. So, after he comes back from overseas, can we arrest him?

President

[not fooled]

9. One sex trafficker honoring another

Columbus promoted the trafficking of women and underage girls from the indigenous people he "discovered."

https://vawnet.org/sites/default/files/assets/files/2020-02/NRCDV_ColonizationHomelessnessandProstitution-Jan2020.pdf]

[IronLionZion]

13. Discovered a place with people living there

got totally lost looking for India

[DBoon]

14. Can we expect a statue of Cortez the Killer next?

[Figarosmom]

15. He doesn't give ashit about Columbus

This is just another stick it to the libs.

[sop]

27. Exactly. Trump knows his moronic MAGA followers love it when he sticks his thumb into woke liberals' eyes.

They love it when Trump trash talks about Mueller death, when ICE goons murder protesters in the streets...they literally can't get enough of Trump's shittiness. We live in a country full of monsters.

[RedWhiteBlueIsRacist]

16. Maybe he should install monkey statues as well. They traveled from Africa to South America on clumps of trees

long before Chris!

[raccoon]

20. I'd rather have a statue of Lt. Colombo.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

22. Trump places statue of Christopher Columbus near the White House

Trump places statue of Christopher Columbus near the White House

The Associated Press
March 23, 2026, 5:29 AM


(1/2)

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — A statue of Christopher Columbus has been placed on the grounds of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, the latest effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to recognize the controversial explorer.

The statue is a replica of one that was tossed into Baltimore’s harbor in 2020 during Trump’s first term at a time of nationwide protests against institutional racism.

Trump endorses a traditional view of Columbus as a leader of the 1492 mission seen as the unofficial beginning of European colonization in the Americas and the development of the modern economic and political order. But in recent years, Columbus also has been recognized as a primary example of Western Europe’s conquest of the New World, its resources and its native people.

{snip}

The original statue was toppled by protesters on July 4, 2020, and thrown into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor after anger boiled over following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police. It was one of many statues of Columbus that were vandalized around the same time, with protesters saying the Italian explorer was responsible for the genocide and exploitation of native peoples in the Americas.

{snip}

[Wiz Imp]

23. Who's next? King George? Jefferson Davis & Robert E. Lee? Hitler & Mussolini?

[dflprincess]

28. There is a statue of Jefferson Davis in the capitol building

It's in Statuary Hall. It was donated by Mississippi in 1931.

I couldn't believe it when I saw it.

[Deep State Witch]

26. Another Guy

Who went to a Caribbean island to r@pe women.

[Sneederbunk]

29. You sir, are an assault on our collective national memory.

[itcfish]

31. Just tell Trump that Columbus

was Spanish and he only spoke Spanish. You will see how fast he removes that statue.

[marble falls]

32. No problem. It'll be pulled out the day after the next inauguration. Lotta tow trucks in DC.