What did Donald Trump do today?

He "brought back Columbus Day."

After what was apparently a very tiring day for him attending the funeral of Pope Francis, Trump had no events on his calendar other than returning to the White House after spending the night at one of his resorts.

But he or someone with passwords to his private microblogging site made sure that he was still talked about today, with this post:

 
Columbus Day is still a federal holiday, and none of the "rules, dates, and locations" regarding its observance that Trump has any say in have changed. 

Trump has also taken credit in the past for "saving" holidays like Christmas, though he's never said how or from what.

Columbus's "reputation" derives from the uncontested fact that he enslaved, murdered, kidnapped, and as a colonial governor brutally repressed indigenous Caribbeans. He also tolerated the rape and torture of indigenous people by other colonizers, as well as the sexual enslavement of prepubescent girls. This was not simply the way of the world at the time: what Columbus did and encouraged Spanish settlers to do in the name of conquest and profit was horrifying even to his contemporaries.

Trump is correct that in recent years a great many places have chosen to remove monuments to Columbus. These were almost universally popular decisions, and contrary to Trump's assumptions about them, not taken as an insult by actual Italian-Americans, whose views about Columbus are indistinguishable from Americans as a whole. 

Trump has been obsessed with statues throughout his political career, to the point of tweeting about nonexistent laws regarding them. Lately, he has been insisting that most of the public money set aside for promoting the arts be redirected to a so-called "Garden of Heroes" he has personally been designing since his first term. He also cited the defense of statues commemorating Confederate heroes as one reason the white supremacist instigators of the deadly Charlottesville riots were "very fine people."

Statues of Trump himself are rare, but several do exist. One was commissioned by an aspiring politician who wanted to curry favor with him, and has been installed away from public view at a Trump golf course. Most of the rest are satirical, like the work installed on a Portland, Oregon street titled In Honor of a Lifetime of Sexual Assault.

Why does this matter?

• Americans are allowed to do things even if Donald Trump doesn't approve.

• Assuming he was fully recovered from the strain of travel, there were more important things for Trump to worry about today.

• Italian-Americans don't deserve to have Trump's feelings projected onto them.