President Trump made clear Sunday that he would not follow his predecessor’s practice of recognizing Indigenous Peoples Day alongside Columbus Day in October, accusing Democrats of denigrating the explorer’s legacy as he pressed his campaign to restore what he argues are traditional American icons.
Democrat Joe Biden was the first president to mark Indigenous Peoples Day, issuing a proclamation in 2021 that celebrated “the invaluable contributions and resilience of Indigenous peoples” and recognize “their inherent sovereignty.”
The proclamation noted that America “was conceived on a promise of equality and opportunity for all people” but that promise “we have never fully lived up to. That is especially true when it comes to upholding the rights and dignity of the Indigenous people who were here long before colonization of the Americas began.”
Mr. Trump on Sunday used a social media post to declare, “I’m bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes.” He said on his Truth Social site that “the Democrats did everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much.”
He said he is “hereby reinstating Columbus Day under the same rules, dates, and locations, as it has had for all of the many decades before!”
The federal holiday, the second Monday in October, was still known as Columbus Day during Biden’s term, but also as Indigenous Peoples Day. It remained a federal holiday and the former president didn’t make any changes as to how or when Columbus Day is recognized in his proclamation, in which he directed the flag of the United States be displayed on all public buildings “in honor of our diverse history and the Indigenous peoples who contribute to shaping this Nation.”
Biden’s recognition had been a longtime goal of activists who wanted to shift the focus from commemorating Columbus’ navigation to the Americas to his and his successors’ exploitation of the indigenous people he encountered there.
Several years before Biden’s proclamation, some states and local governments — including Columbus, Ohio, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver and Austin, Texas — had opted to recognize Indigenous Peoples Day over Columbus Day as a way of recognizing victims of colonialism. New York is among many places that acknowlodge both names of the federal holiday, with Gov. Kathy Hocul first recognizing Indigenous Peoples Day in 2021 while New York City continues to hold the largest Columbus Day parade in the country.
Though Mr. Trump has long objected to telling the country’s history through a lens of diversity and oppression, the holiday he seeks to restore to its primacy was added to the calendar as a nod to the country’s growing diversity.
Columbus’ expeditions never touched the North American continent, let alone any land that is now part of the United States. But the native of Genoa became increasingly commemorated in the United States as Italian immigrants flocked to the country and politicians sought to win their support.
Indeed, it was the lynching of 11 Italian-American immigrants in New Orleans in 1891 that led to the first Columbus Day celebration in the United States, led the following year by President Benjamin Harrison. President Franklin D. Roosevelt designated Columbus Day as a national holiday in 1934.
Mr. Trump has long complained about Democrats tearing down statues of Columbus, a complaint he made again in Sunday’s post. In 2017, he spoke out against a review of the 76-foot-tall statue of the explorer in New York’s Columbus Circle that then-Mayor Bill de Blasio had ordered. It remains in place today, but other statues have been defaced or torn down.
In 2020, the Trump administration paid to restore a Columbus statue in Baltimore that was dumped in the harbor during protests against the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Dozens of other Columbus statues across the country were taken down or in the process of being removed, and many of them were vandalized after the renewed Black Lives Matter protests began.
