With fuel prices surging and the war with Iran dragging on, President Trump’s popularity has slipped among nearly every demographic group. So on Friday — three days before Columbus Day and less than four weeks before the midterm elections — he made his pitch to Italian Americans.
“As you know, the radical left communists hate Columbus and they want to abolish Columbus Day,” Mr. Trump told a group of several hundred Italian Americans he had gathered in the East Room of the White House.
“These lunatics that are running,” he continued, “they’re all against Christopher Columbus. But I’ll tell you what, we’re going to be here almost two-and-a-half years. He’s going to be so protected, like nobody’s ever been protected before.”
Columbus has not, in fact, been a notable issue on the campaign trail. But Mr. Trump sought to inject the Genoese explorer into the current political moment.
He stood on a stage beside two large black presentation boards displaying images of white marble statues of Columbus, whose voyages, beginning in 1492, opened the Americas to European colonization. Mr. Trump has had one statue installed on the White House grounds and plans to put another in the Rose Garden.
The first statue, erected several months ago on the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the West Wing, is a replica of the monument that protesters tore down and dumped into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor during the racial justice protests of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd.
Columbus’s enslavement of Indigenous people made him a focus of that reckoning. As The New York Times has reported, more than 30 statues of the explorer were torn down or removed that summer. Cities across the country moved to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of Columbus Day.
A number of Italian American groups viewed such moves as an attack on their heritage, and since then, several have worked to have the monuments to Columbus restored or relocated. In Baltimore, a local artist recruited a team of divers to retrieve the pieces, and his son created the replica that now stands near the White House.
Mr. Trump has cast himself as Columbus’s savior.
“The reason I get all of the Italian vote, I really believe. I didn’t do it for this reason. I resurrected him,” the president declared at the event on Friday.
Columbus, the president added, has “been rehabbed 100 percent.”
Mr. Trump was warmly applauded in the East Room, but it’s unclear how far such a message will travel outside of the gathering of his allies. About 16 million Americans report Italian ancestry, according to the Census Bureau. But polls show voters across the board are far more concerned by the high cost of living than they are by cultural issues.
The president may also have ground to make up with the Italian American community. Over the past year he has attacked Pope Leo XIV, and when Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy called those attacks unacceptable, he attacked her as well. His administration also picked a fight with Italian pasta makers, threatening crippling tariffs on the industry.
At the White House, the audience cheered and laughed along as Mr. Trump offered his own distinctive impressions of Italian culture.
He opened his speech by praising the late Italian operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti and introduced another opera singer of Italian descent, Christopher Macchio, whom he described as Mr. Pavarotti’s equal. Mr. Macchio sang the national anthem, and Mr. Trump called him back at the end for “Ave Maria” and the Puccini aria “Nessun dorma.”
Later, Mr. Trump complained that filmmakers had stopped giving movie mobsters Italian names because they thought it was discriminatory: “I said, ‘No, no, you have to understand. The Italians. They love it.’”
The president spent most of his speech regaling the audience with tales of his construction projects all over Washington, and he found an Italian connection there, too. He called up onstage Brett Rugo, whom he credited with building the helipad on the South Lawn of the White House with its granite depiction of the presidential seal.
“He’s a serious Italian,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s a serious Italian and he built the beautiful helipad.”
Mr. Trump called out several notable Italian Americans in the room, including Andrew Giuliani, the son of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York.
But one notable Italian American in the room did not get a shout-out. Sitting quietly at the back was the man at the center of one of the most visible embarrassments of Mr. Trump’s second term: John J. Cafaro, a donor to Mr. Trump, whose firm secured a no-bid contract to install a water purification system in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Mr. Trump had promised to make the pool clear and beautiful for America’s 250th anniversary celebrations this year, but the water turned green with algae and became the subject of round-the-clock television coverage and mockery by late-night comics. Mr. Trump blamed vandals, but his administration backed away from prosecutions after failing to produce evidence of wrongdoing.
Among the dark suits on Friday, Mr. Cafaro stood out in an indigo-and-maroon brocade blazer with a metallic paisley sheen.
Asked whether he was still working on the Reflecting Pool, Mr. Cafaro told a Times reporter that he was and that all was going well. “They’re going to start filling it Monday, I hear,” he said. Then he quickly got up and walked away, out of reach of the reporters who were fenced in behind a rope.
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