Trump to Honor Columbus With Statue at the White House. Good. | The American Spectator

Most history geeks struggle to turn historical facts into headlines.

After all, you can’t exactly write “Man Sails to India. Finds New Continent Instead” and be taken seriously in the modern age. We’ve all known that Christopher Columbus’s trip to the East Indies was interrupted by the placement of an inconvenient mass of land since our third-grade teacher drilled that handy little piece of poetry into our heads.

That hasn’t stopped anyone from trying, of course. Usually, sometime in mid-October, a bunch of talking heads and history-enthused journalists discuss the merits of keeping Columbus Day on the calendar or of renaming it. (Even ideologues like long weekends). Usually, that’s when we’re all told how very awful the man who discovered this continent was.

Columbus, you see, was a scheming tyrant. When he set sail with three tiny boats to cross a vast ocean, he was planning on bringing Western sins and disease to the innocent natives on the other side of it. He planned the mass extinction of peoples he didn’t know existed. Spices were a side quest. Spreading the good news of the gospel? Definitely not something he was concerned about. (READ MORE: God in the Age of Pronouns: Father, Mother, or Neither?)

This is the simplified moral fable that has dominated the narrative both in the media and leftist academic scholarship for decades. When the Washington Post learned earlier this week that President Donald Trump is likely planning to install a statue of this personification of evil outside the White House, it appropriately made headlines.

To make matters worse, the statue is allegedly supposed to be the same statue Ronald Reagan unveiled in the 1980s and which Baltimore rioters dumped into the city’s harbor in 2020. Italian-American businessman Bill Martin, who was involved in the statue’s rescue and restoration, confirmed that it’ll be transferred to the Trump administration at some point in the next few weeks.

Yes, this is Trump thumbing his nose at leftist rioters.

Celebrating the heroic actions of the man who got into a 100-ton boat, braved the Atlantic and a potentially mutinous crew for three months, and discovered the continent we now live on is certainly justified. The fact that it’ll make the right people mad is a nice bonus.

The fact is, while Columbus may not be a saint (and none of us are calling for his canonization), he was also not the Disney-esque villain leftist academics have made him out to be. Rather, he was a complex man trying to navigate a complex situation and who probably did a lot better given the circumstances than many of us would. (READ MORE: A Nation That Can’t Explain 1776 Urgently Needs a Civic Education Revival)

See, what we’re not told when we’re assured that the arrival of the Spaniards ushered in an “American holocaust” is that, when Natives decided to burn down a Spanish settlement and kill everyone in it, Columbus urged that “restrain and mercy” be shown to them.

That seems a commendable response given that it was coming from a man dealing with tribes like the Kalinago peoples in the Caribbean Islands, who may or may not have been into eating roasted humans.

In one diary entry, Columbus wrote, “[I]n the world there are no better people or a better land. They love their neighbors as themselves, and they have the sweetest speech in the world and [they are] gentle and always laughing.” A rather odd opinion to have of a people you plan on exterminating. On his third voyage to the new world, Columbus even hanged a Spaniard who disobeyed his explicit orders not to harm Native peoples.

Does all this excuse him for sanctioning the exploitation of Native labor in a political concession he made to the mayor of La Isabela on Santo Domingo after the latter staged a revolt against Columbus’s brother? No. Would any of us have done it differently? Probably not.

Then, of course, there are the colorful allegations made by his contemporary, Francisco de Bobadilla, which include things like chopping off the ears and noses of corn thieves, or parading women around naked for the crime of suggesting that Columbus and his brother were “of lowly birth.” Those, of course, seem a bit doubtful when you realize that de Bobadilla and Columbus were longtime political enemies, and the former was very interested in supplanting Columbus as the governor of the so-called West Indies. Unsurprisingly, de Bobadilla’s allegations conspicuously lack corroboration. (READ MORE: When Common Sense Went Viral)

It’s usually worth keeping a man’s motives in mind when using his slander as evidence.

What we do know is that, for all his faults, Columbus was far more interested in using his discoveries and their fruits in service of his faith than for any personal gain. He urged King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain to use the profits of his discovery to finance a crusade to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims (a conquest he believed would help usher in the Second Coming of Christ). His first words to the natives (albeit in a language they didn’t understand) were reportedly, “The monarchs of Castile have sent us not to subjugate you but to teach you the true religion.”

So yes, Columbus may not be a saint, but he is a hero. Erecting his statue outside the White House, if the reports are true, is a great move by the Trump administration.

And if your problem with it is that Columbus isn’t even the first European to land on these shores, then please, erect statues of Leif Erikson and St. Brendan alongside him. He’ll be in good company.

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