President Donald Trump made it clear on Sunday that he would not follow his predecessor’s practice of acknowledging Indigenous Peoples Day alongside Columbus Day, accusing Democrats of devaluing the explorer’s legacy when his pressured campaign restores what he considers traditional American idol.
Democrat Joe Biden, the first president to commemorate Indigenous Peoples Day, issued a declaration in 2021 to celebrate “the valuable contribution and resilience of Indigenous peoples” and recognize “their inherent sovereignty.”
The declaration states that the United States “is based on a commitment to equality and opportunity for all”, but that promise “we have never completely failed. This is especially true when preserving the rights and dignity of the indigenous peoples here long before the American colonization.”
“I bring Columbus Day back from the ashes,” Trump announced on Sunday using a social media post. “The Democrats do everything they can to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation and all the Italians who love him so much.”
The federal holiday is the second Monday in October and is still known as Columbus Day during Biden’s tenure, but also Aboriginal People’s Day. It was a long-term goal of activists who wanted to focus from the voyage to the Americas in memory of Columbus, to the exploitation of the indigenous peoples he encountered there by him and his successors.
Although Trump has long opposed telling the country’s history through diversity and oppression, his holidays in his attempt to restore its primacy have been added to the calendar to pay tribute to the country’s growing diversity.
Columbus’ expedition never touched the North American continent, let alone any land that has now become part of the United States. But as Italian immigrants flock to the country and politicians are trying to win their support, Genoese are increasingly commemorating in the United States.
Indeed, it was the lynching of 11 Italian-American immigrants in New Orleans in 1891 that led to the first American Columbus Day celebration, led the following year by President Benjamin Harrison. Franklin D.
Trump has long complained about Democrats demolishing the Columbus statue, a complaint he filed again in Sunday’s post. In 2017, he opposed the review of the 76-foot statue of explorers in Columbus circle in New York, when the then-Economic Bill de Blasio ordered. It still exists today, but other statues have been defiled or torn apart.
In 2020, the Trump administration paid to restore the statue of Columbus in Baltimore, which was abandoned in the port in protest of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
