Christopher Columbus is back. At least, a statue of him is back , reinstalled by US President Donald Trump on the White House grounds in late March - part of the president's stated mission to cancel "cancel culture".
Author
- Garritt C. Van Dyk
Senior Lecturer in History, University of Waikato
The resurrection of Columbus made good on Trump's 2025 executive order , "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History".
The statue is in fact a replica of the original thrown into Baltimore Harbor by protesters on Independence Day 2020 during the Black Lives Matter upheavals of the first Trump presidency.
The protests targeted monuments "honoring white supremacists, owners of enslaved people, perpetrators of genocide, and colonizers". But damaged pieces of the Columbus statue were later salvaged and became a model for the copy.
Trump has since championed Columbus as "the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth".
He might have chosen any statue of the explorer and navigator from Genoa who pioneered European colonisation of the Americas. But clearly reinstating one removed by his opponents sends a more powerful message.
'Improper partisan ideology'
Restoring statues to their original location isn't simply about undoing their previous removal. It's designed to reverse what some see as attempts to "erase history".
And it has a long history of its own. Roman emperors once feared being condemned to obscurity through " damnatio memoriae " - having their statues destroyed, coins melted down and names chiselled from the facades of buildings.
Trump's executive order was very much about retaliating against those who want to "perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology".
Relocating a memorial to a more prominent location - from Baltimore to the White House, for instance - goes one step further. It amplifies the significance of the historical figure and the symbolic restoration of their reputation.
But sometimes just restoring a statue to its original site is symbolism enough.
The memorial to Albert Pike, for example, was and is the only outdoor statue of a Confederate general in Washington DC. Pulled down by protesters in 2020 and returned in 2025 , its merits have long been debated.
Pike was a disgraced figure, accused of misappropriating funds and allowing his troops to desecrate the bodies of Union soldiers. There are also alleged ties to an early version of the Ku Klux Klan.
In the words of congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton , "Pike represents the worst of the Confederacy and has no claim to be memorialized in the Nation's capital."
Advocates for the statue's retention note there is no mention of the Confederacy or depiction of a military uniform, only Pike's contribution to the American Freemasons.
But when the statue was pulled down in 2020, Trump certainly took sides : "The DC police are not doing their job as they watched a statue be ripped down and burn. These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our country."
'Woke lemmings'
Of course, history isn't always simple, as memorialising the American Civil War shows.
Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia was established in 1864 as a national military cemetery, with a Confederate section dedicated in 1900 as part of the effort to promote reconciliation between the North and South.
Its Confederate Memorial (designed by a Confederate veteran) features a female figure representing the South holding symbols of peace. A bronze relief below depicts sanitised images of slavery: a woman caring for white children, and a man following his owner into battle as his servant.
A biblical quotation below preaches peace: "They have beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks."
But another quote in Latin - "Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Caton" - references Julius Caesar's victory in the Roman civil war and casts the South's defeat as a noble lost cause.
The monument was erected in 1914, removed by Congress in 2023, and is scheduled to return in 2027. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claimed on social media it "never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don't believe in erasing American history - we honor it."
Defiant choices
Similarly, an equestrian statue of Founding Father Caesar Rodney - installed in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1923 and removed in 2020 to prevent damage by protesters - highlights these contested readings of history.
Rodney is famous for riding all night from Delaware to Philadelphia, through a thunderstorm, to break a deadlock and cast the deciding vote in favour of American independence in 1776.
But as well as being a brigadier general and signatory to the Declaration of Independence, he owned 200 slaves on his family's plantation.
The statue is now scheduled to reappear for six months, this time in Washington DC, to celebrate America's 250th anniversary on July 4. It will be installed in Freedom Plaza , named in honour of Martin Luther King Junior.
Placing the contested statue of a famous slave owner in a space dedicated to a Black civil rights leader is a provocative, if not defiant, choice. And it shows again how powerful symbols and symbolic actions can be.
The argument that removing statues also erases history doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It conflates public visibility and symbolic placement with actual knowledge of the past.
In that sense, reinstalling controversial memorials is, in itself, an attempt to rewrite history by erasing a more recent past and returning to an old, disputed status quo.
Garritt C. Van Dyk has received funding from the Getty Research Institute.
