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.
The statue is located outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where it is visible from Pennsylvania Avenue NW and 17th Street NW. The White House had considered putting the statue on the South Lawn, The Washington Post reported in February.
The piece is a reconstruction of a statue that President Ronald Reagan unveiled in Baltimore in 1984, and that was dumped into the city’s harbor by protesters in 2020 as a racial reckoning swept the country. A group of Italian American businessmen and politicians, working with local sculptors, obtained the pieces and rebuilt the statue with financial support from local charities and federal grant funding.
“Destroyed July 4, 2020,” reads a panel affixed to the base of the sculpture. “Resurrected 2022.”
The panel also says the sculpture was gifted to the White House last year and Trump rededicated it in October.
“In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero. And he will continue to be honored as such by President Trump,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. The New York Times first reported Sunday that the statue had been installed.
The Columbus statue is just one of numerous sculptures that Trump has taken steps to install on the White House grounds and on other federal land. Several statues of revolutionary-era political leaders now stand in the White House’s Rose Garden, and the president is planning a large sculpture garden to commemorate 250 famous Americans, a project that he has dubbed the Garden of Heroes — and that could be erected in Washington’s West Potomac Park.
Trump is also planning to install a towering bronze statue of Caesar Rodney — a signer of the Declaration of Independence and an enslaver — on a plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the U.S. Capitol. The Rodney statue has been gathering dust in storage after being removed from public view in Delaware during the 2020 racial justice protests.
Trump condemned efforts in 2020 to tear down statues of Columbus and other historical figures, issuing an executive order that called those actions an “assault on our collective national memory” and creating a task force to rebuild monuments.
The Italian explorer was long celebrated for his voyage in 1492 to the Americas, which opened up trade routes with Europe and built his reputation as a heroic discoverer. Columbus’s journey also set the stage for colonization and enslavement, and academics and activists in recent years have called for an end to honoring him, noting the brutal treatment of Native people that followed his arrival on the continent.
Some U.S. states now recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of Columbus Day; Joe Biden in 2021 became the first president to mark the holiday.
Trump has framed his moves to honor Columbus as a political act. He campaigned in 2024 on promises to celebrate Columbus Day, and in October he signed a presidential proclamation to recognize Columbus as “the original American hero” and commemorate the annual holiday.
“You Italians are going to love me,” Trump said at a political rally last year, adding that Italian Americans had been “badly treated” by past efforts to remove Columbus Day and that he would restore the holiday.
Nino Mangione, a Republican member of the Maryland House of Delegates, was involved in efforts to recover the Columbus statue from the Baltimore harbor. He praised Trump’s plan to install it at the White House in an email to The Washington Post last month.
“This world is full of haters and screamers who want to silence our voices, our values, and our votes,” Mangione wrote. “President Trump is standing up to them because it is the right thing to do and I applaud his courage in doing so.”
Others have panned Trump’s plan, saying that installing a statue of the explorer would generate controversy. Jeff Miron, the vice president for research at the Cato Institute, a prominent libertarian think tank, said that museums, documentarians and other outside groups are better positioned to “present a complete perspective on Columbus” than the White House.
“President Trump’s decision to erect a Christopher Columbus statue at the White House exemplifies why government shouldn’t be in the statue business at all,” Miron said in a statement last month.
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