Gareth O'Callaghan: What Columbus and Trump have in common isn’t leadership — it’s greed

Christopher Columbus’s brutal conquest shaped America’s foundations — a legacy Donald Trump seems determined to revive today

The Columbus statue in Barcelona: His brutality towards the Amerindians, as they were known, during his journeys along the coastline of Central and South America became his true legacy.

“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” I remember the poem from my school days, when we were taught the Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, departed Palos in Spain with three ships — the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria — and sailed across the Atlantic to discover the vast and unpopulated 'New World'. 

In the simplistic setting of primary school, the man credited with being the first to step onto American soil was a hero, from a time when most people believed the world was flat and nothing existed beyond their own coastlines.

Except he didn’t discover a new world. Nor did he ever set foot in North America, which had been inhabited by the Clovis people 13,000 years before Columbus was even born.

His original plan was to establish a western route to the east Indies and profit from the spice trade, which was worth a fortune. Within three days of setting sail from Spain, he stopped in Las Palmas, in the Canaries. 

History has it his crew threatened to mutiny because they weren’t sure wooden ships would survive the journey sailing west. One month later, he set sail for Asia, out into the deep Atlantic carried by the northeast trade winds, not remotely aware the Americas lay somewhere in between.

Christopher Columbus first came ashore on the island of Guanahani in the present-day Bahamas 533 years ago. Ever since, and right up to modern times, indigenous communities all over the Americas have been persecuted.

This tale of adventure captured the imagination of a naive global audience — until years later when the lie was laid bare. Columbus wasn’t so much an explorer as an exploiter, which earned him the title “tyrant of the Caribbean”.

What he witnessed in Las Palmas during his short stopover — how the Spanish were subduing the indigenous natives in the Canary Islands — set the tone for his own conquests, and for how Europeans would treat indigenous people for centuries.

Columbus first came ashore on the island of Guanahani in the present-day Bahamas 533 years ago. Ever since, and right up to modern times, indigenous communities all over the Americas have been persecuted. 

In 1492, between five and 15 million indigenous people lived in North America. By the early 19th century, there were fewer than 230,000.

His brutality towards the Amerindians, as they were known, during his journeys along the coastline of Central and South America became his true legacy. As self-appointed governor of what would later become the Dominican Republic, he ordered the slaughter of many of the natives who attempted to revolt against him. 

Then came the diseases that wiped out the majority of the populations who had no immunity to measles, small pox, typhus and influenza, which were brought ashore by Columbus and his men.

During his first term as president, Donald Trump regularly praised Columbus. One of America’s federal holidays is Columbus Day, marking Columbus’ arrival in the Americas in 1492. The date also celebrates Indigenous People’s Day — a cruel contradiction for Native Americans who live with the consequences of Columbus’s actions.

Harry Truman told the US Congress in 1952: “One of the reasons we lead the free world today is that we are a nation of immigrants.” In January, Trump introduced an order to end birthright citizenship in the US for children of illegal immigrants, as well as immigrants legally but temporarily present, such as those on student, work, or tourist visas.

His administration has argued in court this puts children of immigrants in the same position as Native Americans. Native Americans became citizens by virtue of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which reads: “All non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States.” 

However, even if that act were now repealed, it would be irrelevant — all descendants of those people impacted by the 1924 law now have birthright citizenship under the constitution, because they were born to citizens.

The logic isn’t entirely clear, because it doesn’t stack up. What is clear, however, is the motivation common to so many of his actions — Trump’s disdain for people who are not white.

The president’s deep dislike for Native Americans became clear almost 10 years ago, when he daubed US Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has distant Indigenous American ancestry, “Pocahontas” — a reference to the Native American woman from the Powhatan people, who was captured and ransomed by English colonists in 1613.

During his 2015 presidential announcement speech, he associated Mexican immigrants with drugs, crime and rape. In 2018, he directed the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services — the federal agency that oversees immigration — to remove the words “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants” from its charter.

In the same year, he asked a bunch of legislators why the US was accepting immigrants from Haiti and other “shithole countries”. He even insisted Barack Obama’s acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by Bill Ayers, a white man.

Just as Columbus imagined the wealth that lay on the other side of the world, Trump never stops thinking of the opportunities for personal enrichment the presidency gives him. Picture: AP /Alex Brandon

Trump appears to view immigration through the same racial grading lens that Columbus used when he first encountered the indigenous tribes of the Americas, while ignoring the fact the Clovis people still exist to this day in the genetic code of the small number of surviving Native Americans.

Trump has succeeded in turning today’s immigrant into that ominous “Injun” of the American Frontier myth — an unpredictable savage whose motivations are unknown and unfathomable. Fast forward the centuries, as Trump unveils plans for his own New World, which involves his cavalry — Immigration and Customs Enforcement — liberating white America.

Warsan Shire, the British poet of Somali descent, wrote movingly about migration: “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” 

For migrants to the US now, it must seem like going from one shark to another. Consider Trump’s attitude to the notorious warmongers and dictators many migrants are fleeing.

In 2017, he invited Philippines dictator Rodrigo Duterte, who justified the killing of journalists (at least 190 killed since 1986, as of July 2022) and called the Pope a “son of a whore”, to the White House during what he called a “very friendly” phone call. It’s believed the number of deaths in Duterte’s war on drugs was as high as 30,000.

A year before, he described Vladimir Putin as “really very much of a leader”. Russia, known for its persecution and killing of its critics, political opponents and journalists, also discriminates against children with disabilities.

He described China’s Xi Jinping, known as “the world’s worst jailer of journalists” (135 journalists behind bars as of 2024) as “a very good man and I got to know him well”.

As for Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, where “abuses were without parallel in the contemporary world”, according to a 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry, Trump described him as “a pretty smart cookie”.

It’s impossible for a compassionate person to understand why the president of the United States would happily admit to engaging with tyrants who have done objectively terrible things to innocent people. However, in order to understand Trump, or Columbus for that matter, it’s necessary to forget compassion.

Christopher Columbus didn’t sail the ocean blue out of compassion. Greed was his priority, not exploration. He was instrumental in the colonisation of America, leading to what the country has become today — a racially divided society built on inequality and, it seems, determined to turn back the clock on racial justice. 

Just as Columbus imagined the wealth that lay on the other side of the world, Trump never stops thinking of the opportunities for personal enrichment the presidency gives him. If, in the course of that personal enrichment, a few “savages” must be sacrificed, so be it.