Rep. Elise Stefanik marked Columbus Day on Monday with a message to Italian Americans, writing, "As a proud Italian American, I'm wishing all a Happy Columbus Day!"
The greeting from the New York Republican landed the same day President Donald Trump issued his own holiday message praising what he called the "great Italian American community" and condemning the wave of vandalism that toppled Christopher Columbus statues across the country during the 2020 protests. The president has previously signed an executive order protecting Columbus Day as a national holiday, a step his administration has pointed to as a direct answer to the statue removals and the broader push by progressive activists to strip the explorer's name from public squares.
Trump's statement, released Sunday ahead of the federal holiday, extended greetings to "all Americans and Italian Americans" and framed the day as a celebration of the community's contributions to the country. The message drew on the same themes that have defined the modern Columbus Day fight: pride in Italian American heritage, reverence for the immigrant experience, and a refusal to let the holiday be erased by what conservatives describe as a coordinated campaign against American history.
Stefanik's greeting echoed that framing. The congresswoman, whose district covers a large stretch of upstate New York, has long presented herself as a defender of Italian American identity and has been an outspoken critic of efforts to remove Columbus statues or rename the holiday. Her message on Monday was brief and direct, but it placed her alongside the president in a coalition of elected Republicans who have made the holiday a cultural line in the sand.
The holiday's defense has also drawn in voices beyond electoral politics. Chicago writer James Banakis, in an essay circulated by columnist John Kass, argued that Christopher Columbus was Greek, a claim Kass acknowledged would come as a surprise to "our friends Sal and Ben Carmada from Joseph's Finest Meats" and to "all my wife Betty's relatives back home in Montemaggiore Belisto Sicily." Kass's column, published a day before the holiday, used the heritage debate to needle the conventional narrative that Columbus Day belongs only to one ethnic group and to remind readers that the figure at the center of the holiday has been claimed, studied and celebrated across the Mediterranean for centuries.
The most heated front in this year's Columbus Day fight is New York City, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani confirmed through City Hall that he would not join Monday's procession up Fifth Avenue. According to The New York Times, the mayor instead planned to host an Italian American heritage reception at a later date, an attempt to mark the community's contributions without appearing at the parade itself. The decision did not sit well with everyone. Some Italian Americans told the Times they were glad the mayor would stay away, a sign of how thoroughly the parade has become a proxy for the broader argument over the holiday's future.
Mamdani's relationship with the holiday was already strained. In a separate Fox News report, the mayor's Italian Heritage Month tribute to a congressman with Communist Party ties drew backlash, with former New York City Council member Vickie Paladino accusing him of pushing communist propaganda. The congressman at the center of that dispute was not named in the report, but the charge from Paladino — a Staten Island Republican long known for her sharp-elbowed style — underscored the suspicion many Italian Americans in the city harbor toward a mayor whose political roots sit on the democratic socialist left.
The Columbus Day question has been building for years. The 2020 protests that followed the killing of George Floyd saw statues of Columbus pulled down in cities across the country, including in Baltimore, Boston, Richmond and Minneapolis, and in some cases dumped into harbors or set on fire. In response, Trump issued an executive order in 2020 directing federal agencies to protect monuments and statues, and he has since used the holiday as an occasion to rally Italian Americans against what he describes as an assault on their heritage. His Sunday message reprised that theme, pairing the holiday greeting with an explicit condemnation of the statue vandalism.
For many Italian American families, the holiday retains a meaning that has little to do with the academic debates over Columbus's voyages. It is a marker of arrival, a day when the descendants of immigrants from Sicily, Naples, Calabria and the rest of the peninsula celebrate their place in American life. That sentiment animates Stefanik's message as much as any policy dispute. Her one-sentence greeting, issued under her own name, is the kind of statement that would once have been unremarkable. In the current climate, it functions as a small act of defiance.
The holiday's defenders are not monolithic. Kass's column, for instance, is less a defense of Columbus than a meditation on the strangeness of the fight, using the Greek claim to poke at the certainties on all sides. Banakis's essay is a work of historical argument, not political messaging, and Kass himself seems more interested in the company of his wife's Sicilian relatives than in litigating the fifteenth century. But the column's placement in the Columbus Day conversation shows how far the debate has spread beyond the usual political actors.
In New York, the mayor's decision to skip the parade has become the day's central political fact. Mamdani, the city's first Muslim mayor and a figure of national interest on the left, has been careful to avoid the kind of direct confrontation that would make the holiday an even larger story. His Italian American heritage reception, announced by City Hall, is a recognition that the community's votes and its cultural institutions matter. Whether the reception will satisfy the parade's organizers or the voters who have celebrated on Fifth Avenue for generations is another question, one that will be answered at the next election rather than on Monday.
Paladino's charge of communist propaganda, aimed at a tribute the mayor paid to a congressman with Communist Party ties, shows the temperature on the other side. The accusation is the kind of rhetoric that has become standard in New York's ethnic politics, where the lines between heritage celebration and ideological combat are often indistinct. The mayor's allies have not responded publicly in the coverage available, leaving the exchange one-sided for now.
Taken together, the statements from Stefanik, Trump, Kass's column and the New York fight form a single story about a holiday that refuses to stay ceremonial. Columbus Day in 2026 is a day when the president of the United States condemns statue vandalism, a New York Republican sends a one-line greeting to Italian Americans, a Chicago columnist uses a Greek ancestry claim to unsettle the debate, and the mayor of New York stays home while his critics accuse him of trafficking in communist imagery. None of that is likely to end the argument. It is more likely to define it for another year.
Our Take
Elise Stefanik's three-word greeting is the kind of statement that used to be uncontroversial and now reads as a quiet rebuke of the people trying to erase the holiday. That is the real story here: the defenders of Columbus Day are no longer on the defensive. Trump's executive order, his Sunday message, Stefanik's greeting, and the visible frustration of Italian Americans in New York who would rather see the mayor stay away than show up and pretend — all of it points in the same direction. The progressive campaign to tear down Columbus has stalled, and the people who fought it are looking for a Republican bench that will keep fighting. Stefanik just reminded them she is on it.
