A 13-foot statue of Christopher Columbus now stands on the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. It got there because rioters threw the original into Baltimore Harbor on July 4, 2020 — and President Trump had it restored and relocated to the White House grounds in March.

On Wednesday, he threw it a party.

The White House East Room hosted a full Columbus Day celebration, complete with tenor Christopher Macchio singing the National Anthem and a presidential proclamation designating October 12 as Columbus Day. Not "Indigenous Peoples' Day." Not "Fall Heritage Awareness Week." Columbus Day — the one Biden spent his presidency trying to bury.

Trump's proclamation described Columbus as "a man of valor, adventure and ingenuity," which is the kind of language that sends the statue-toppling crowd into a spiral. The event was organized in partnership with the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations, a group that has spent years pushing back against the campaign to strip Columbus from public life.

The history is worth remembering because the people who want Columbus erased sure won't teach it. In August 1492, Columbus departed Spain with 90 men aboard three ships — the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María — and spent more than two months crossing an ocean nobody had charted. He didn't have a GPS. He didn't have a committee. He had a compass and a bet that the world was bigger than anyone thought.

President Ronald Reagan dedicated the original Columbus statue in Baltimore in 1984. It stood for 36 years. Then came the summer of 2020, when mobs decided that tearing down monuments was a form of "justice" and city officials decided that letting them do it was a form of governance. The statue went into the harbor. Nobody was charged.

Trump didn't write an op-ed about it. He didn't form a task force. He had the statue restored, moved it to the White House, and then invited the Italian American community to celebrate around it. That's not symbolism. That's a receipt.

The contrast with the previous administration writes itself. Biden issued proclamations for Indigenous Peoples' Day every year he was in office, treating Columbus Day like an embarrassment the country needed to apologize for. His position was that recognizing the man who opened the Western Hemisphere to European civilization was somehow an act of cruelty. The proclamations read like hostage letters from someone who'd been cornered by his own staff.

What Trump understands — and what the renaming crowd never will — is that you don't defend Western civilization by being embarrassed about it. You defend it by putting a 13-foot statue of the guy who started it on your front lawn and daring someone to complain.

The statue stands on the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Reagan dedicated the original. Rioters destroyed it. Trump brought it back.

It's 13 feet tall. The mob isn't.