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”. The resurrection of Columbus made good on Trump’s 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. The statue is a replica of the original thrown into Baltimore Harbour by protesters on Independence Day 2020 during the Black Lives Matter upheavals of the first Trump presidency. Protesters targeted monuments “honouring white supremacists, owners of enslaved people, perpetrators of genocide, and colonisers”. 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 civilisation, 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 from Genoa who pioneered European colonisation. But clearly reinstating one removed by his opponents sends a more powerful message. Restoring statues to their original location isn’t simply about undoing their removal. It’s designed to reverse what some see as attempts to “erase history”. 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 buildings.
Trump’s executive order was about retaliating against those who want to “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimise 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 – amplifies the significance of the figure and the symbolic restoration of their reputation. Sometimes, just restoring a statue to its original site is symbolic enough. The memorial to Albert Pike, for example, 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 memorialised in the Nation’s capital.” Advocates for the statue’s retention note there is no mention of the Confederacy or a military uniform, only Pike’s contribution to the American Freemasons. But when the statue was pulled down in 2020, Trump took sides: “The DC police are not doing their job as they watched a statue be ripped down and burnt. These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our country.”
History isn’t always simple, as memorialising the American Civil War shows. Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia was established in 1864, with a Confederate section dedicated in 1900 to promote reconciliation. Its Confederate Memorial 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. A biblical quotation below preaches peace: “They have beaten their swords into ploughshares.”
The monument was removed by Congress in 2023 and is scheduled to return in 2027. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claimed it “never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history – we honour it.” Similarly, an equestrian statue of Founding Father Caesar Rodney – installed in Wilmington in 1923 and removed in 2020 – highlights these contested readings. Rodney is famous for riding all night to Philadelphia to cast the deciding vote in favour of independence in 1776. But he also owned 200 slaves.
The statue is scheduled to reappear for six months in Washington DC to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. It will be installed in Freedom Plaza, named in honour of Martin Luther King Jr. Placing the statue of a famous slave owner in a space dedicated to a Black civil rights leader is a provocative choice. Reinstalling controversial memorials is, in itself, an attempt to return to an old, disputed status quo.
The Conversation