A marble statue of Christopher Columbus was recently installed on the White House grounds, as US president Donald Trump continues to remake the complex by paving, gilding, demolishing and rebuilding various parts of it. The statute currently stands near the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, facing Pennsylvania Avenue, and is protected from the general public by a fence.
The sculpture is a replica of a monument that protesters in Baltimore dismantled and threw into the Inner Harbor in 2020, during nationwide demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd. Divers later recovered fragments from the Baltimore monument, which were scanned and used as the basis for the full-scale reproduction now at the White House.
The installation forms part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to reposition Columbus as a symbol of national pride—he is one of the more controversial figures expected to be represented in the president’s planned patriotic sculpture park, the “National Garden of American Heroes”.
“As we celebrate our nation’s 250th anniversary of independence, the White House is proud to honour Christopher Columbus’s legendary life and legacy with a well-deserved statue on the White House grounds,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement quoted by NPR. “In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero, and President Trump will ensure he’s honoured as such for generations to come.”
Statues, monuments and other tributes to Columbus in the US have come under growing criticism in recent decades due to the waves of colonial violence and exploitation that his arrival in the so-called “New World” in 1492 set in motion. Many have argued that his achievements as an explorer are overshadowed by his role in the enslavement of Indigenous Taíno people and the broader violence and population collapse that followed European colonisation.
At the same time, Italian American organisations have defended such statues as important markers of cultural identity, particularly given the discrimination faced by earlier immigrant communities. Many Columbus monuments across the United States were installed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Italian American groups. The decision to place the replica on federal property reportedly emerged during planning for the upcoming 250th anniversary of U.S. independence.
Edward Lengel, a former chief historian of the White House Historical Association, told The New York Times that the Columbus monument’s installation is consistent with the Trump administration’s other transformations to the White House campus, which are “turning it into a partisan battleground”.
Late last month, as the US and Israel launched a joint war on Iran, statues of Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton were installed in the paved-over Rose Garden. According to The Daily Beast, they were loaned to the White House by “generous private American patriots”.
