Through a Glass, Darkly: Trump, Columbus, and the War Over Memory

When history forgets the conquered, the conqueror gets to look like a hero.

There’s always an air of theater about the way Donald Trump holds a proclamation. The paper becomes a stage prop, his glare a performance of authority. This week’s Columbus Day declaration was no exception, an effort, he said, to “reclaim the extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue.”

The word reclaim does a lot of heavy lifting there. It’s the rhetorical shovel Trump uses to dig up old myths and polish them until they gleam again, no matter how much blood they’re caked in.

Christopher Columbus, he tells us, was a hero. A man of vision, a man of God, a man of discovery. What he doesn’t say, what he never says, is that Columbus’s “discovery” was someone else’s apocalypse. The Taíno people had names for their islands, their children, their gods. They were not “discovered”; they were invaded, enslaved, and decimated.