Trump’s Columbus statue: A new reason to smash the settler death cult!

The Trump administration erected a new statue of Christopher Columbus on the White House grounds March 23 as Trump made his latest attempt to revive his death cult. That Trump is doing so now is telling. 

Columbus’ 1492 voyage to the Caribbean opened a 500-year campaign of colonialism, terror and genocide against Indigenous people. The U.S empire continues to expand this campaign through its support for the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the terror bombing of Iran. 

The same March 23 week, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a motion that would demand reparations for the traffic of enslaved Africans, traffic that Columbus did so much to help establish. The only three countries to vote no were the U.S, Israel and Argentina, the last under the misrule of U.S satrap Javier Milei.

Jean-Luc Pierite, President of the North American Indian Center of Boston (NAICOB), wrote, “Slavery is the gravest crime against humanity,” in a statement posted to Facebook March 26. “The physical abuses and stolen lives are evidence of the actual institutional justice. Pleading guilty is to accept culpability for the dehumanization and commodification of souls, coupled with robbing the Earth of vitality in the name of profit. Donald Trump revived and installed the very idol of slavery as a sentinel in front of the White House. Christopher Columbus is there to gaze across the ocean as the Middle East is irrevocably changed.”

Since taking office, Trump has repeatedly glorified Columbus for his “extraordinary legacy” — which is the genocidal colonization of the Western Hemisphere. Following his master’s lead, Vice President JD Vance called the genocide of Indigenous peoples a victory for “Christian civilization” at a Turning Point USA event on Oct. 29, 2025. (The Independent, Oct. 31, 2025)

The Columbus hagiography Trump is tapping into is only one genre of the racist mythmaking the ruling class has purveyed since the founding of the U.S. The settler state’s fabricated origin story glorifies the Pilgrim settlers who massacred the Wampanoag and stole their lands. 

In 1996, United American Indians of New England (UAINE) activists seized and buried the pebble known as “Plymouth Rock,” which embodies the Pilgrim “Thanksgiving” legend. Although Plymouth authorities eventually cleaned up the pebble, every year on this “National Day of Mourning” Indigenous activists and allies return to the site to tell the real history of Plymouth — and the ongoing Native resistance to the U.S settler project.

National monuments enshrined enslavers

After the establishment of the U.S as an independent capitalist empire, national monuments enshrined George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other founding slavocrats and land thieves as national heroes. Although some liberal commentators have tried to distinguish shrines to the “Founding Fathers” from the monuments dedicated to Confederate “traitors,” they in fact celebrate the same legacy of massacre, rape and enslavement. A prime example of such desecration is “Mount Rushmore,” which scars the sacred Lakota Black Hills. 

But these monuments also testify to desperation in the face of the resilience and resistance shown by Black and Indigenous communities. 

To reestablish their dominance after the revolutionary rising of the Black proletariat during the Reconstruction period following the U.S. Civil War, planters started funding memorials that celebrated the defeated Confederate slavocracy. Beginning in the 1890s, hundreds of shrines to white supremacy went up across the U.S. 

The most famous of these shrines to slavery is Stone Mountain, a monolithic bas-relief of Confederate warlords Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Stone Mountain commemorates the 20th century revival of the racist Ku Klux Klan, which sponsored the monument’s construction. (atlantahistorycenter.com/monument/) 

As the Black liberation struggle intensified during the 1950s and 60s, state and local governments throughout the U.S. decreed a new wave of Confederate monuments. Over the past decade, activists have started bringing these idols to white supremacy crashing down. The push began on Aug. 14, 2017, when protesters — including Workers World Party activists — downed a Confederate statue in Durham, North Carolina, during the nationwide antifascist actions touched off by the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlotteville, Virginia, two days earlier.

In a statement released after the Durham action, Workers World pledged: “We must continue our struggle until all symbols of white supremacy have been destroyed. Just as Durham’s Confederate statue easily crumpled and folded in on itself as it crashed to the ground, so can the systems of white supremacy and the capitalism that it represents, when confronted by organized worker power. When we organize and support one another in direct action, the systems set up by the ruling class don’t stand a chance.” (www.workers.org/2017/08/32898/)

Summer of 2020

Following the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protesters throughout the summer brought down dozens of white supremacist statues on both sides of the Atlantic, including those of Confederate generals, Jim Crow oligarchs and merchants who profited from the trade in enslaved Africans, like Edward Coltson. In Bristol, England, a crowd tumbled Colston’s statue into the city’s harbor. (bbc.com, June 7, 2020) 

In June 2020, an anonymous activist decapitated a statue of Christopher Columbus at Boston’s Waterfront Park. “This guerilla art installation of a beheaded Christopher Columbus is representative of the state violence endured by Black and Indigenous peoples for over 500 years,” declared Indigenous leader Jean-Luc Pierite at a Boston City Hall Plaza rally of 5,000 Black Lives Matter protesters following the 2020 historic decapitation. “Any attempt to erase our history by the restoration of that statute will be met with Black and Indigenous peoples asserting our rights and our sovereignty!” 

It was UAINE and NAICOB-led protests that forced the City of Boston to completely remove the statue, which it has not replaced. At subsequent Indigenous Peoples Day actions, protesters have returned to Waterfront Park to commemorate the beheading and demand that the pedestal put up by a reactionary Knights of Columbus club, along with all other monuments to Columbus, be torn down. 

As these felled statues prove, marble and bronze cannot preserve an empire as rotten as the U.S, whose imperial decline — fully exposed by Iran in the Persian Gulf — itself signals a systemic breakdown of global capitalism. But we cannot wait for its collapse. 

The actions of Indigenous and Black activists from Plymouth to Durham have taught that liberation includes smashing the idols of a dying colonialism. By doing so we can honor the centuries of Indigenous and anti-imperialist struggles, which alone show the possibilities of a future free of capitalism and its perverse morality which continues to honor mass murders and rapists like Columbus instead of those who fought against him.