Being MAGA Means Pretending That a Giant, Golden Columbus Statue Improves Your Life

I hope that Donald Trump is sufficiently thankful for how incredibly low the bar has been set, in terms of the publicity stunts he so frequently employs to curry favor with his base. Once upon a time, a President announcing the commissioning of a statue of a 15th century explorer would have been the kind of thing received with shrugs and head scratches by the Americans he purports to serve, as they immediately discard that information, given that it doesn’t materially affect them in any way. Today, though? Well buckle up, America: Your woes will soon be a thing of the past, because the beneficent President Donald Trump is gifting you with the ultimate panacea, a big-ass statue of Christopher Columbus next to the White House! DELIVERING FOR AMERICA!

It’s the latest and dumbest chapter of the assumption of the figure of Columbus into the right-vs-left American culture war, in which the reactive American right has been compelled to champion and obsess over the historical and cultural validity of an Italian explorer born in 1451, who never even physically set foot on the land that would become the continental U.S.A., because the left dared to add context to the historical record. This might have the dubious distinction of making Columbus the most prominent “American” icon to never actually visit America, given that his four voyages starting in 1492 brought him exclusively to Caribbean islands (the Bahamas, Hispaniola, Cuba) and coastal Central/South America. Another fun tidbit: Columbus went to his grave still thinking that he had reached the East Indies, and that landmasses like the Bahamas and Cuba were in fact Japan and China, among other things. He died being roughly as wrong about geography as it was possible for a person to conceivably be, but at least he was confident in his errors. Sound like any head of state you can think of?

The actual statue in question is reportedly a reconstruction of a statue that previously stood in the harbor of Baltimore, before it was torn down and toppled during the nationwide outpouring of racial justice protests in 2020 that occurred in the wake of the police killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd. In the subsequent left-wing campaign against imperialist or racist symbols, statues of Columbus became a frequent target.

“In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero, and he will continue to be honored as such by President Trump,” said a statement from White House spokesman Davis Ingle, quoting a well-known bit from The Sopranos in a move that displays at least a touch more media literacy than we tend to expect from Trump lackeys.

The Sopranos reference is calculated toward the actual point of erecting such a statue, in the eyes of the Trump administration: A symbolic outreach to Italian-American voters, who the White House apparently expects to react with glee and tears of thanks and affirmation, because if there’s one consistent aspect to the administration’s approach, it’s the assumption that all Americans are stupid. Trump has been completely guileless about the intent of this approach, telling reporters recently that his proclamation to “reclaim” the legacy of Christopher Columbus (which dubbed him “the original American hero”) would no doubt win him Italian-American votes: “The Italian people are very happy about it. Remember when you go to the voting booths, I reinstated Columbus Day.” Democrats, meanwhile, he claimed had been doing “everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much.” Because yes, obviously, giving greater context to the brutal legacy of colonialism in the 15th century clearly has the effect of “destroying all of the Italians.” Who could forget 2020, when all the Italians were suddenly destroyed?

The ground-level cultural phenomenon of how a figure like Christopher Columbus has been absorbed into the culture war reflects the inherent embrace of and resistance to change and learning that is alternatingly championed by the American left and abhorred by the American right. Those with the capacity for greater understanding of how the world works are naturally curious to learn that Columbus, while Governor of Hispaniola at the end of the 1400s, instituted campaigns of mass death, rape, slavery, torture and general exploitation against the native Arawak and Taíno people, which ultimately had the affect of reducing the Taíno population in particular from hundreds of thousands to a mere handful of survivors within the course of a single lifetime. Culturally speaking, genocidists don’t make for the best “original American heroes.” But on the American right, the foundational idea of cultural conservatism implies the drive to “conserve” the cherished framing of how every element of history has always been taught to impressionable American children, regardless of new information. The framing of Christopher Columbus as a butcher exploiting the lands he discovered is different from what someone in Trump’s cohort learned about in elementary school in the 1950s or 1960s, and thus must be discarded even if it’s more historically nuanced or accurate. All that matters is the conservation of whatever was being taught in those halcyon days when American life was better and more pure.

he’s mistakenly thinking of Chris Columbus the director of Home Alone 2

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— Rob DenBleyker (@robdenbleyker.com) Feb 4, 2026 at 5:06 PM

If there’s a unifying thesis to the MAGA experience, that might very well be it: Anything I learned as a child is sacrosanct, and if I can only go back to believing those things, then life will be simple and joyous once again. Why else would people in Trump’s orbit be trying to lobby him to say, declare that Pluto is a full-fledged planet once again? Are there really that many people out there, furious that their favored “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” mnemonic has become sadly out of date? Or do they just sense on some level, deep down, that the con man in the White House has neither the interest nor ability to measurably improve their lives, and must thus instead fall back on pointless, symbolic victories to keep up the daily charade that they’re “winning” a culture war in which there are no winners?

Idea for 2027: The Trump administration should declare that Christopher Columbus made a heretofore unknown final expedition, becoming the first person to discover the ninth planet of Pluto, in the process granting our nation sovereign claim to the celestial body, given that it was discovered by the “original American hero.” Just imagine how many migrant detainees he could probably fit on that rock.