President Trump took to Truth Social to declare that he would not be recognizing Indigenous Peoples Day alongside Columbus Day in October, a practice started by Former President Joe Biden in 2021 to celebrate “the invaluable contributions and resilience of Indigenous peoples” and recognize “their inherent sovereignty.”
In his Truth Social post, President Trump stated, “I’m bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes. The Democrats did everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much.” Columbus Day remained a federal holiday throughout Biden’s full term; Indigenous Peoples Day was merely celebrated alongside it.
Despite Trump’s objections to telling the country’s history through a lens of diversity and oppression, Columbus Day was originally celebrated for that exact purpose. Columbus never explored the North American mainland, let alone any of the future 50 states.
However, as more Italian immigrants flocked to the country, Columbus was increasingly celebrated by politicians seeking to win the Italians’ support. It was specifically the lynching of 11 Italian-American immigrants in 1891 that led to the first Columbus Day celebration in the U.S. the following year, with President Roosevelt designating it as a national holiday 4 decades later in 1934.
Trump has a long history of objections to Democrats tearing down statues of Columbus, a stance that was again reiterated in his Truth Social post. In 2017, he spoke out against a review of a 76-foot-tall statue of the man in New York’s Columbus Circle that, at the time, Mayor Bill de Blasio had ordered. That statue remains standing to this day, however many others have been torn down, such as one in Baltimore that was dumped in the harbor during the protests against George Floyd’s murder in 2020, which the Trump Administration paid to restore.
