The Trump administration recently took a position on a man with a documented record of genocide and enslavement. “In this White House,” a spokesman announced last week, following the installation of a statue on the grounds of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, “Christopher Columbus is a hero.”
It is worth pausing on that word. A hero, in the civic sense, is not merely someone whom people admire. It is someone whose story the country agrees to tell in a particular way. Heroism is a narrative decision.
When the White House installs a statue and declares the man it depicts a hero, it isn’t making a historical claim. It is making an editorial one, asserting the authority to decide which version of the past gets to occupy the seat of American power – or to stand on its grounds.
Columbus’ historical record is not ambiguous. The Indigenous Taíno population collapsed within decades of his arrival as forced labor, starvation and violence ravaged entire communities. He authorized the enslavement of Indigenous people and the trafficking of women and girls. His own contemporaries documented as much. The accounts existed, and powerful people repeatedly and deliberately set them aside so they could tell a more beneficent story about themselves.
Honoring Columbus at the White House does not require discovering these facts. It requires deciding they do not matter.
This is hardly without precedent. Monuments such as this have never been neutral. Leaders and acolytes alike use them to simultaneously honor and terrorize. That’s why hundreds of Confederate statues went up after the civil war, most during the early and mid-1900s. Columbus serves a similar function now. By choosing to honor the demonstrably dishonorable, this president is not making a historical argument. He is doing something far more dangerous. We now have an American president who looks at a documented record of genocide and enslavement, decides it changes nothing, and then insists that we all know as much.
The statue installed last week is a replica of one that protesters dumped into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in the summer of 2020, in the weeks after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. Columbus had long occupied American civic space as a founding hero, laundered through myth into something we have taught children to celebrate. Many of us learned it as a rhyme – “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” – without learning what happened afterwards.
Those protesters understood exactly what they were doing. They were contesting a narrative: rejecting the claim that conquest is heroic, that the suffering underpinning American mythology is beside the point, that the people harmed by that mythology should continue to live beneath its monuments. They were not rewriting history. They were refusing the version of it that more powerful people imposed upon them.
Trump’s answer is to install a replica of that same statue on the White House grounds.
When people frame such an event as part of a “culture war,” they mischaracterize it as though two sides are simply disputing the meaning of the past, each with an equal claim on the story. That framing misses the power differential entirely. Identity is not a distraction from power. It is how power works.
At the UN, the United States recently voted against a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade a crime against humanity. In Florida, the state attorney general is demanding that the NFL abandon its Rooney rule, the league’s longstanding policy mandating that teams interview minority candidates for open coaching and executive positions before making a hire. Both reflect a governing logic in which history imposes no obligation – power acknowledges a historical harm, then rewrites the story so that any obligation arising from it becomes the real injustice. Acknowledging the past is pointless if we excuse ourselves from addressing its consequences.
This administration has spoken openly about the United States “taking” Cuba, casting sovereign peoples as objects to overwrite rather than agents of their own story. Columbus fits that worldview with uncomfortable precision: a figure who wrote over existing civilizations and called it “discovery,” whose violence America folded into a founding legend because the legend required it.
Installing this statue at the White House now is not a coincidence. It is a declaration of narrative intent. It renders debate irrelevant. Objection becomes noise. Trump doesn’t need to defend conquest, whether in Iran, Venezuela, or here in the US. He just needs us to accept it.
There is a version of this story in which the statue is merely provocation, political theater meant to generate outrage before the news cycle moves on. Symbols do not just reflect power, though; they tell the public what kinds of stories are authoritative, what kinds of power are worth honoring, and who gets to decide when a counter-narrative carries enough weight to matter.
What this symbol says is that the verdict protesters delivered in the summer of 2020 – in the toppling of monuments, in a national confrontation with what those monuments actually celebrated – did not bind anyone with sufficient power to ignore it. Why bother denying history when you think being president allows you to simply edit it?
The protesters who dumped Columbus into Baltimore’s harbor were also telling a story. So were the Indigenous scholars and journalists who have spent careers documenting what Columbus actually did and what it costs to keep pretending otherwise. So were the communities that watched those statues fall.
A country does not move past its history by refusing to reckon with it. It carries that history forward – not as memory, but as permission. The question is no longer what Christopher Columbus did. Most Americans, if pressed, know enough. The question is whether that knowledge is allowed to matter, and who gets to decide when it does.
The protesters who dumped Columbus into Baltimore’s harbor six years ago gave one answer. Trump has given a different one. The American story has plenty of room for the truth, but the president keeps choosing myth instead. Who is going to correct him?
Jamil Smith is a Guardian US columnist
