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.

As Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States: “To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice.” Trump has made his choice.

Zinn’s greatest contribution wasn’t just the history he told, it was the history he refused to let stay buried. He understood that historians are storytellers, and stories reflect their loyalties. Every omission is a form of allegiance. Every silence has a sponsor.

Trump’s Columbus Day proclamation reads like a manifesto of those omissions. It accuses “left-wing arsonists” of trying to “destroy [Columbus’s] name and dishonor his memory.” What it never does is name the people Columbus enslaved, mutilated, and murdered, the Indigenous families whose resistance outlasted the empires that tried to erase them.

That’s the cruelty of historical erasure: it doesn’t just distort the past; it robs the present of continuity. When Trump demands that Americans “celebrate Columbus,” he isn’t celebrating discovery, he’s celebrating forgetting.

At the signing ceremony, Trump’s historical grasp drifted somewhere between a History Channel rerun and a confused Thanksgiving pageant. His aide, visibly rehearsed, read off a script describing Columbus as a “great Italian explorer” who sailed “his three ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.”

Never mind that Columbus was born in the Republic of Genoa centuries before there was an Italy, sailed under the Spanish crown, and wrote primarily in Spanish. Trump interrupted to declare, with the confidence of a man grading his own quiz, “In other words, we’re calling it Columbus Day.” He added, “this is a particularly important holiday for Italian Americans who celebrate the legacy of Christopher Columbus and the innovation and explorer zeal that he represented.”

It was a line so clumsy it almost masked its cruelty. The “zeal” he praised was the same zeal that enslaved and annihilated Indigenous peoples, the very reason so many now mark the day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead. In Trump’s version of history, Italian Americans are to be flattered, Native Americans forgotten.

No mention of Spain. No hint of the Spanish crown that financed the voyage. No acknowledgment that Columbus’s “discovery” began a transatlantic slave trade that outlived him by centuries. Perhaps that silence is deliberate, after all, Trump’s America is busy deporting the very Spanish-speaking families whose ancestors built the hemisphere Columbus claimed to have “discovered.” His version of history loves the conquistador but hates his descendants.

In Trump’s America, Columbus is reborn as a kind of MAGA mascot, stripped of inconvenient complexities, recast as a symbol of “Western greatness,” and resurrected for political theater.

When I first read Zinn’s opening chapter to my children, they were stunned. They knew Columbus as the man in the rhyme, “sailed the ocean blue”, not the man who cut off hands when his gold quotas weren’t met or hacked off breasts so mother’s couldn’t feed their infants.

They sat in silence for a long time afterward, trying to reconcile what they’d learned in school with what they were finally hearing. Silence is the sound of innocence colliding with truth.

Zinn taught that history written by conquerors becomes a moral lullaby, soothing, repetitive, false. Voices of a People’s History shatters that illusion. When you read the words of Indigenous leaders, from Chief Joseph’s grief to Leonard Peltier’s defiance, you realize that the story of America isn’t discovery but survival.

Trump’s “reclamation” of Columbus isn’t about heritage, but hierarchy. His America is a museum of selective memory, curated to flatter the powerful and erase the rest. Columbus becomes a brand, a shorthand for empire repackaged as virtue.

But Trump’s war on memory isn’t limited to raids and rhetoric. He’s dismantling the very institutions built to preserve history. The Smithsonian has been gutted. curators of Native, Black, and immigrant histories quietly dismissed, exhibitions on colonialism and human rights shelved or “under review.” The museums that once told the story of America’s contradictions are being turned into showrooms of triumph.

At the Pentagon, the renaming of military bases, once a long-overdue act of reckoning with slavery and rebellion, has been reversed. Fort Liberty is Fort Bragg again, Confederate generals restored to honor under the banner of “heritage.” It’s historical necromancy: resurrecting ghosts to serve the living.

Only one version of America deserves to be remembered, and it’s the one that flatters the regime. It’s narrative control. Trump’s government isn’t just rewriting the textbooks. It’s rewriting the archives.

It’s the same lens Trump applies to every facet of his rule: immigrants are “invaders,” protestors are “arsonists,” billionaires are “builders.” The goal isn’t to remember, it’s to own the story. Because whoever controls the narrative controls the conscience.

In this retelling, Indigenous peoples vanish, not because they were unimportant, but because their presence makes conquest indefensible. Trump’s proclamation doesn’t merely forget them; it needs them forgotten.

The mythology doesn’t stop at 1492. Trump’s government is already busy writing its own heroic sagas, this time about the ICE raids, where families are being hunted in their homes and the regime’s propaganda calls it “law and order.”

It’s the same sleight of hand Columbus used, the same one the empire perfected: rename cruelty as courage, call conquest discovery, call deportation protection. Every boot on a doorstep becomes a “defender of freedom,” every child torn from a parent an “unfortunate necessity.”

This is how empire sustains itself, by turning memory into a mirror that flatters the oppressor. The difference is that now, we’re watching it happen in real time, with press conferences instead of parchment.

The real fight isn’t over statues or holidays. It’s over whose memory counts. One version of America, Trump’s version, centers the conquerors and demands gratitude. The other, the one Zinn championed, listens to those who were conquered and finds in their endurance the truest definition of courage. Trump’s version demands reverence. Zinn’s demands responsibility.

And that’s why this Columbus Day proclamation matters far beyond its calendar date. It’s not about the past, it’s about the right to remember honestly. Authoritarianism doesn’t begin with tanks. It begins with erasure. It begins with the smiling man at the podium, holding up a piece of paper, and insisting that cruelty was courage all along.