Trump’s Newest White House Change Will Make You Roll Your Eyes

The president has a new appeal for voters ahead of a contentious 2028 midterm election, and it comes in the shape of a violent slaver who never actually stepped foot in the continental United States.

Donald Trump is reportedly planning to erect a statue of Christopher Columbus outside the White House, according to a Washington Post exclusive published Wednesday. It will likely be placed on the south side of the White House grounds, close to E Street and north of the Ellipse, two people with knowledge of the plan told the Post.

The Columbus statue is expected to be reassembled from a Reagan-era piece that was erected in Baltimore in 1984. The statue was destroyed and dumped into the city’s harbor by protesters in 2020, leaving just remnants behind.

Those fragments have been stitched back together thanks to funding from a group of Italian American businessmen and politicians, as well as financial support from local charities and federal grant funding.

The White House refused to comment on the reported plan but affirmed its support for the Italian explorer.

“In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement. “And he will continue to be honored as such by President Trump.”

Columbus has been officially celebrated in the U.S. since 1934, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt designated Columbus Day a national holiday in an attempt to fold the country’s Italian American immigrants into early American history.

Since then, Columbus has been hailed as the first voyager to reach North America—despite the fact that he never actually landed here. In truth, Columbus’s four voyages all ended up in the Caribbean. Nonetheless, the fifteenth-century explorer is credited with initiating sustained European contact with the Western hemisphere, marking the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade.

Columbus’s legacy became hotly contested in 2020, when a nationwide debate on race swept the country, sparking questions as to whether the historically controversial colonizer’s myriad accolades should be revisited. In 2021, President Joe Biden recognized Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of Columbus Day, marking a federal shift in the country’s relationship to Columbus.

Trump campaigned, in part, to bring Columbus Day back, and signed a proclamation in October in order to do so.

“We’re back, Italians. OK? We love the Italians,” Trump said at the time.  

Last month, Trump claimed that resurrecting Columbus’s positive memory could win over Italian Americans come election season.

“The Italian people are very happy about it. Remember when you go to the voting booths, I reinstated Columbus Day,” he said.