Trump attracts hate for celebrating Columbus ‘genocidal murderer’ Day

Critics of US President Donald Trump are once again waxing apoplectic, after he honored Christopher Columbus on the annual US holiday dedicated to the explorer’s first landing in the New World.

“On Columbus Day, we commemorate the achievements of this skilled Italian explorer and recognize his courage, will power, and ambition — all values we cherish as Americans,” Trump wrote in the proclamation he issued on Monday, praising Columbus’s “spirit of determination and adventure.”

“Today, in that spirit, we continue to seek new horizons for greater opportunity and further discovery on land, in sea, and in space,” Trump wrote.

The president’s critics were quick to point out what was missing from the proclamation: any mention of “pain and suffering” of the population European explorers encountered.

In his last Columbus Day proclamation in 2016, Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama called for Americans to “remember the communities who suffered, and let us pay tribute to our heritage and embrace the multiculturalism that defines the American experience.”

Columbus “committed genocide,” said one outraged journalist. He was “tyrannical and committed atrocities against indigenous populations and Spaniards,” said another. A third called Columbus “a genocidal maniac and a bumbling idiot.”

Then there was a podcaster who saw Trump’s proclamation as evidence the president is a “white supremacist,” and a perennial troll of Trump’s tweets who called the explorer a “murderer, rapist and slave driver.”

Working for the Spanish crown, the Italian-born explorer led a three-ship expedition seeking to establish a new trade route to India by sailing across the Atlantic. He made landfall in the Caribbean on October 12, 1492. Though Columbus never set foot on the North American continent himself, his expeditions opened the doors for European explorers, conquerors and settlers.

The date of his landing has been a US federal holiday since 1937. It was adjusted in 1970 to fall on the second Monday in October.

READ MORE: ‘Mass murderer’: Columbus statues in US vandalized on Columbus Day

Since 1992, a number of cities and jurisdictions across the US have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day. This year they were joined by Columbus, the capital of Ohio named after the explorer.

In August 2017, one of the oldest US memorials to Columbus in Baltimore, Maryland was damaged with a sledgehammer. The activists who attacked the 225-year-old monument filmed it and posted it on YouTube, calling themselves the “Popular Resistance” and preaching the message of “racial and economic justice.”

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