8. The conflating of private and public interests that has been revealed in the Trump Presidency finds an earlier and telling precedent in the bald-faced belief that a monumental statue, of unprecedented height and size, could be erected on personal property–of which one owned but a small share–as a form of their public promotion, and an illustration of personal prestige of the Trump brand that already was emblazoned atop multiple New York buildings, and would continue to become unable not to notice in the New York landscape, which seemed to be colonized by his brand.
And if the monument was finally erected on the northern edge of an island that lies at the outer edge of American territoriality, beside fields where workers toil in its shadow, as if without acknowledging the monstrosity, the statuary of a ship bearing the monumental navigator, its sails etched with royal insignia of Catholic crosses befitting the Catholic majesties of Spain, is almost ignored as an ahistorical rehabilitation of something like a royalist perspective on American “discovery,” an anti-Howard Zinn thesis of American conquest that enacted by one man who sought to conquer, seize the wealth, and even hoped to enslave the native inhabitants he met who had come out to meet him, without bearing arms.
The monument was planned to arrive on a property here Trump notionally owned–and where he hoped tax breaks and rezoning would allow the tallest building in the world–but its roll-out would occur with help from friends and funders he grew acquainted in a 1996 visit to post-Soviet Moscow. It is difficult to separate Columbus from subjugation. But the statue evokes it openly: the purification of Columbus that Donald Trump proposed as a statement of his own grandiosity echoes the sense of right Columbus described the Arawak he saw before making landfall in the Bahamas in his Journal–“They do not bear arms, and do not know them . . . [but] would make great servants. . . . With fifty men, we could subjegate them all and make them do whatever we want.“–despite its utter contextual appearance, appealing to the desire Trump felt for a marker of the greatness he desired for the development.
The conflation of personal interests and public symbolism, continued after he adopted Presidential trappings after 2017, suggested a deep confusion that lay not only in awful aesthetic tastes, but ambitions to a global scope and scale even with the rewriting and remolding of ideals: Columbus is fetishized as a historical marker of time, but for Trump, he became a new way to promote his brand and identify his place on a global real estate market. Trump had in 1996 eagerly pronounced Moscow as having perfect potential for a Trump Tower–as if he were the arbiter of global power, given the fact that “I’ve seen cities all over the world!”–was revealed in the almost unbound eagerness he showed for locating a Trump Tower to confirm the international status of his brand and attract funding for building global destinations, after several casino bankruptcies and a pressing need to reduce his substantial debts.
Was accepting the statue not only a huge tax write-off, but a way of ingratiating himself to Russian oligarch hosts, to secure a toehold in Moscow’s real estate development, almost entirely overseen as if in ancien regime fashion by Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who presided over the invitation of capitalism and cronyism to the Soviet capital, with his billionaire developer wife?
Trump’s overwhelming concern with brand over nation is the point–and seems almost pathological. Rebuilding on the ruins of the old rail tracks on the side of Manhattan, he had successfully had rezoned for residences, Trump long sought to promote a West Side Yards Development, having bought the development rights to landfill almost offshore in 1985. The alchemy of real estate development promised that he could in fact “discover” by residential rezoning a region of New York City never destined for residences, but rail, provided a scheme for announcing his arrival on a global realty market. In claiming a critical role in the arrival of what he treated as fruit of his negotiations to promote Moscow property in a post-Soviet market in 1997, as the next big thing on New York’s skyline after Trump Tower, it offered an even splashier announcement and marquis as it was farther from Midtown; the massive monument might also inaugurate Trump International as a brand, beside most urban residences but suitably removed from congestion and noise, and indeed from the city.
The Augustan Neo-imperial Columbus fit Trump’s tastes for grandiosity. Unlike the original thousand apartments he wanted to build off the West Side Drive, the statue’s size would symbolize Trump International, as if removed patriotic values or state-sponsored nationalism. For in adopting a statue four American cities rejected outright because of the ugliness of questionable monumentality, the monument’s acontextual elevation of the navigator as a white, Christian national hero and royal emissary, seemed in fact less of a figure of state than a mirror in which Trump saw his own values reflected.
The statue of the navigator was not only an emissary, but a vision of the new globalism Trump wanted to promote. Moscow oligarchs had recently offered him as a rebranding of Trump International–he proposed a $250 million investment for a Trump International complex at a November 1996 news conference in Moscow, and openly bragging upon returning to New York that he cultivation of Mayor Yuri Luzhkov boded building only “quality stuff” in the city–just before he dropped public hints of plans to erect the Russian oligarchs’ gift of the Columbus statue as a new face of Trump Properties–and inaugurate the global branding of Trump Properties around the world that, thirty years later, propelled him into American politics, where he championed Columbus as a symbol of the nation, landing “in what today is known as the Bahamas” but as a transoceanic voyage “enabling a global perspective for the first time” and “brought two continents together,” in a geographic rewriting of the map?
9. Still more attention might be devoted to the transactional nature of the proposed monument of that global navigator, a contested national symbol–despite the historical prominence of Columbus statues, of far lesser size, along the eastern seaboard. But if these monuments were evidence of the pride of an Italian-American community eager to define its acceptance and assimilation into white America, Trump excitedly accepted an “anonymous gift” of the Russian people of the ma whose “spirit of discovery” he later praised as fundamental to the nation from a foreign agent.
The transnational nature of the monument–sponsored in some way by a state or para-state actors, who remain in the shadows–of national symbolism, if contested symbolic value, is perhaps particularly troubling. (Does it not reflect the two-sided nature of any real estate map, demonstrating the location of ownership, but obscuring the financial web that underlies “ownership,” often enabled by funds flowing from overseas from China or Russia–as was the case in the West Side Yards?)
The map of financial interests remains obscure. But Trump had little regard from where needed funds needed flowed, as long as the monument–Christopher Columbus, Trump Tower, Riverside South, the US-Mexico Border Wall–was built. That was secondary to the construction of the monument as a platform of promotion. If the map at the base of the statue installed in Puerto Rico, by 2016, with Tsereteli professing pleasure at its location, shows nothing like the map of the sort Columbus used, and reveals no traces of native inhabitants. It is not surprising that there is a movement to have it dismantled: for the massive monument, hoped to attract tourist ships, tells a story of transatlantic conquest that conveys a sense of arriving at a chosen destination that is waiting to be claimed.
It is hardly surprising that Trump was attracted to the theme–announcing the arrival of the realtor to a new site on the shore of the Hudson, or just off the shore–if not in international waters!
The map at its base adorned a Mercator projection, created a century after Columbus’ voyage, with a wind-rose–like the anachronistic rotary wheel in Columbus’ hand was only invented after the navigator’s life, it showed little interest in historical accuracy. But the unfurled banners on three caravels promote the travel to the newly discovered islands on an island where Columbus truly set foot. If pieces of the sculpture only arrived in Puerto Rico in 1998, twenty years after the 1991 sculpture of the “New World” had been cast in Moscow and respectfully considered by six other possible passive sites for a conquest over space.
The location of the figure who was an icon of geographic discovery and mobility, whose truly monumental scale would move a contested symbol onto the grounds of an exclusive set of luxury residences with a private shopping center, Olympic sized pool, and exclusive remove. Some things never change. Much as President of the United States, Trump has been described as exciusively interested in “big things” that related to himself, and the colossal monument was not only “big”–larger than the Statue of Liberty!–but met the complex in projected scale, towering over the urban skyline and Hudson River, much as the building he had promoted for the same site in previous years would be simply the tallest in the world, leading to a pleasure in indulging his own insatiable sense of grandiosity.
The use of Columbus in parades, public monuments, and indeed place-names in America is concentrated on the east cost–he is often shown and celebrated as America’s version of the Renaissance man. Unlike the monuments clustered in the east coast and northeast that mirror the settlement of Italian American immigrants eager to identify Columbus as a figure of their integration and assimilation with a white America, a hundred years or so previous, the triumphal statue was an almost openly royalist sign–and a token of grandiosity that reflected Trump’s ambitions and aspirations to create a new center promoting his real estate skills.
By the time that Trump seems to have decided to accept what a Russian sculptor–and his unknown patrons–presented as a sign of comity, it was clear that the presentation of the “gift” probably served multiple ends of mutual favor–arriving as it may have from the Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov who controlled bids for local real estate, since Boris Yeltsin assumed the Presidency. The art of statuary was in deep ways rehabilitated in Luzhkov’s Moscow, replacing the monumental icons of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, whichseemed to “melt into air,” the prominence of a monument fashioned from $40 million of bronze.
The arrival of such a free gift raises questions of above the board transactions and the covering transportation costs and materials–let alone what this monumental Columbus, for which American never asked and whose symbolic value was being contested at the time of the 1992 quincentennial, when ties of Columbus to a multiethnic nation were questioned in relation to human rights: unlike 1892–a centenary celebratorily commemorated as an occasion for collective national pride–the global voyage was difficult to reconcile with republican ideals in relatively cheap symbolically powerful scenography as easily as it in the past: the figure of the white navigator seemed quite removed, and less clearly observed as spanning the map with a clear vision of the world.
If the image of the Republic was the towering icon that was the center of the Century of Progress World Exposition of 1892 that celebrated the westward expansion of the United States, and its hemispheric dominance as a beacon of liberty, the bronze Columbus proposed a cultic significance as a god of real estate markets in ways dislodged from any discourse of republicanism or political representation. Trump was characteristically eager to conflate his increasing the value of the property on which construction was slated to start, at a time he was drowning in debt, to promote the “gift” of this “major work,” containing $40M of bronze, even after it had already panned by three American cities–Columbus, Ohio; Baltimore, Miami–even to import a Russian-made Columbus presiding over the river shore as if it were a gift of state, all the better to leverage a place for himself, perhaps, in Moscow real estate.
The head surely seemed to be attached to an outsized body when its 2,750 individual pieces were assembled, as if the statue were made to be modified to fit Trump’s hope that the final version he was able to see erected on properties that would probably bear his name, was securely taller in height–a Trump obsession–than Lady Liberty who raised her torch further down the bay.
How Trump became target as an avenue to donate a colossal statue of questionable aesthetic value raises questions about Trump’s connections to Russian oligarchs and realtors, Trump’s longstanding conflation of personal gain and an iconography of national populism, and the rewriting Columbus as a national icon on a global stage. If the monumental statue “Birth of the New World” was meant to cement the post-Soviet era, and inaugurate a new era of global relations, a hailing figure of Columbus would have been an odd addition to a region with few tall monuments save the Statue of Liberty, Trump boasted about his ability to mediate the gift that served to publicize his own development. The apparently anodyne recycling of what became a nationalist symbol, if once promoted by immigrants as an ideal of assimilation, in something like Russian folk art was not made for Trump, but the statue intended to be given as a symbol of international cooperation and a new US-Soviet era after the Cold War, the statue assembled from 2,750 pieces appealed as a form of personal publicity.
For Trump, a real estate promoter, was eager to see make landfall, left hand rising from a rotary wheel, right hand raised in an eerily disembodied form of salutation.
No matter that Columbus had never arrived anywhere near New York, or that this image of Columbus, dwarfed by sails that bore royal insignia, as almost a Neo-Augustan imperial ideal. The medalled image of Columbus as a neoclassical figure was mediated through Disneyfied filter, but Trump loved its size. But if Columbus was designed in Moscow, he was an image that might be used as a new symbol of the Trump brand for international hotels, golf, luxury goods, alcohol and politics–a global network of the Trump brand from the early years of the Trump administration, using the coat-of-arms Trump had designed for his family, as a retrospective projection of global empire and global capital.
The Russian ties Trump cultivated as realtor are well known, as are the hopes he had for Russian ties. The Soviets had already invited Trump to explore a half-dozen sites in Moscow with hight hopes he might promote as sites of investment, and oligarchs were eager to attract a new commitment to his investment in Moscow property after the end of the Cold War: the delegation of Luzhkov, who had attracted billions of investment in Moscow by 1997, including 4.6 billion in 1996, and who with his billionaire wife, Yelena Baturina, who ran the construction company Inteko for decades, as Russia’s wealthiest woman, and former “First Lady of Moscow,” and owns multiple hotels, Trump was a magnet for future investment–who might bestow an introduction to her husband’s preferred sculptor as a bit of a prize.
This odd addition to New York’s many monuments–billed as taller than the Statue of Liberty, recast an icon of American immigration and ideals. Columbus was cast an icon of immigration for the Italian-Americans in the eastern United States who had elevated the fifteenth-century navigator’s Genoese origins in the statuary clustered along the eastern seaboard, in the marble Manhattan statue that was chiseled and whose base was cast in a Roman workshop in 1892 to be erected in Columbus Circle. Trump’s triumphal tastes are well known as over-the-top and excessive–he is readying an Executive Order, mandating classical precepts for federal architecture, “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” amending the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture of 1962, to reclaim standards for all American public buildings so that “the classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style.”
The triumphal image of global gigantism became an icon of nationalism that could double as one of profound personal financial advantage, trumpeting in the most attention-getting manner possible the development that Trump had managed to plan by rezoning industrial yards as residential properties, taking a huge profit from the inflation of these lands as a basis for future condominiums. If the statue was eventually erected after Trump was inaugurated as U.S. president, not on the mainland, as Tsereteli so hoped, but on the north coast of Puerto Rico, an island where Columbus had in fact set foot on his second transatlantic voyage, and an eastern outpost of American territoriality. The privately funded erection of the once-nationalist monument became a bizarre transfer of wealth of a statue whose raw metal was valued at $60 million to a cash-strapped nation, reflecting the financial disparities of globalization as does the private funding of its transport and assembly.
Despite the storied hopes for importing this new icon of a royal emissary overseas to a prominent place, the final resting place of the oddly isolated navigator, became a spectacle without much audience, standing amidst empty fields, at the dawn of the Trump Presidency, on the coast of an island mostly populated by fishermen and long in economic decline, ironically despite the lack of minimal economic aid Trump has offered the island as it recovers from natural catastrophe–in a weird bookend to the start of Trump’s career as a public politician: he had fist declared his candidacy for President in the Reform Party soon after promising to build the statue, as if intoxicated by the powers political office might hold.
The Columbus quadricentennary of 1892 made its largest impact, of course, in the mainland, and was not widely acknowledged in Puerto Rico as an occasion to celebrate, when the island was under Spanish rule, though Spain issued a commemorative stamp. The quadricentennary marked first use of a personal likeness on American currency ever–the reluctance to adopt any image of a person or ruler ran deep, provoking suspicion of the imperial connotations of public coinage, and was allowed on a commemorative coin. It was linked to the universality of the globe, rather than to any explicit sense of territoriality; and appealed to the historical specificity of the anniversary, in the coin issued at the Chicago commemoration Rand McNally had helped to underwrite. If one Columbus is historically rooted with a ruff, chiseled worn face, and four masted caravel, the smooth-featured cartoon Columbus seems far more concerned with his stature the probity of values he expressed.
The championing of the clear-eyed foresight of Columbus, imagined as able to have foreseen the new continent of America by his foresight and reading of the newly mapped globe, was recast in the monument.
Removed from a map, indeed, Tsereteli’s bronze figure of Columbus seems to salute the terra firma as a regal emissary, able to domesticate the New World and impress it by his size and monumental grandiosity.
There was an amazing illustration of hubris in how Trump seemed eager to appropriate the majesty Moscow invested in the Columbus monument as a figure of his growing global brand. The huge size of the monument confers on the figure of the navigator a monumental scope akin to Disneyworld, less rooted in any specific time, theater, or moral universe, but only as trafficking in absolutes. The adoption of Columbus as a national icon seems distinct from the odd choice of Columbus as a Neo-imperial visitor from afar, before sails emblazoned with Christian royal emblems, that evoke a sense of government and global monumentality–to be echoed in the projected size of the monument feet taller than the torch held up by the Statue of Liberty of 1896–that the Russian-made monument Trump hoped to sell to the American people, or at least to the New York mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani, whom he believed sufficient to give the towering statue the green light: Giuliani, the yes-man who green-lit rezoning that allowed Trump to promote his projects of building for financial gain, became the man to whom he showed a pretense to defer.
10. The story of Columbus’ strategic unmooring from history over the twentieth century has been told. No longer a figure of republican identity, but one of White Supremacy, the baggage the navigator had accumulated was profound, and the vision of royalism he offered disturbing, as Manifest Destiny had become reborn as an imperialism rooted in provincialism, not globalism. The unlikely story of his adoption as a figure of patriotism told in a previous post advanced to a domain of authoritarianism and fanciful history in the monumental statuary, long kept at arm’s length by American cities and presidents, who seemed less eager to accept the propoal of a new national monument built abroad.
For whereas vituperative rejection of Columbus as providing anything like an image of national identity of the United States–indeed, Columbus emerged as the target of protest, public contestation, and questioning during the 1992 quincentenary, questioned the universality of the navigator who was an emissary of an old world order, and self-identified as such. Trump believed his prominent position in New York commensurate to receiving a national gift he vaingloriously promoted to whoever would listen in 1997 to help “work it out with the City of New York.” The role in which Trump cast himself as an intermediary between New York and the Russian government suggested the capital that he boasted he brought to Moscow in 1997 as an icon of the very capitalist markets that he seemed to embody–leading him to see himself as a evangelist of monumental building who conversed the language of monumentality by which the post-Soviet era was to be defined.
An offer from Moscow’s mayor mayor, the post-Soviet apparatchik par excellence, Yuri Luzhkov, probably led Trump to act as the middleman that Moscow wanted. The meeting with Luzhkov led Trump to approach his friend Rudy Giuliani to propose a “gift of this great work of Zurab” from the Russian people, appealing to Giuliani’s Italian American identity, as well, he hoped, as obtaining a clear tie to the Moscow’s market. That Moscow “would like to make a gift of this great work by Zurab” suggests the complex trans-Atlantic itinerary of the cultic statue that was fabricated in Russia, but poised to be relocated in the United States; after it was turned down by many cities; Trump seemed ready to secure its arrival on shore, a longstanding hope of post-society oligarchs who identified it with the opening up of their markets. Assuring oligarchs that “I am absolutely favorably disposed” to the monument may have led Trump to imagine himself as representing the American people: it shortly preceded his first declaration of candidacy for President.
Trump was dazed by the Russian oligarchs he had met, and the possibility of expanding Trump Properties to a global stage in the post-Soviet world, to be based on a Trump Tower Moscow off Red Square, taller than the Kremlin. He was enraptured with the sculptor’s sense of grandiosity– “Zurab is a very unusual guy. This man is major and legit.”–a grandiosity evident on Tsereteli’s website, his claims of having studies with Picassso, Chagall, and others. Trump was, for his part, more than a bit intoxicated with his global power to serve as a medium for this “gift”–with no strings attached!–from the “Russian people.” How naive he was in accepting the gift of the statue on behalf of the City of New York seemed less of a problem for a man who had already built Trump Tower, which he saw as a new icon of the urban skyline, that had placed him on top of the world–
–as if this would parlay his status to a global stage of realty, in the years that he had already seemed to conquer the New York skyline, as if it were but a microcosm of the world. Indeed, the addition of a statue of such significant height would confirm the ambitions Trump already entertained to restyle the New York City skyline–adding to Trump Place (1997; 165.26 m), Three Lincoln Center (1993; 181.4 m), South Park Tower (1986; 157 m); and the tallest, Trump Tower (1983; 202 m)–both with a taller skyscraper still projected of seventy-six stories with a new statue of 110 meters, or 360 feet–smaller than the buildings, but a nice calling card.
The grandiose Columbus proposed for the Hudson shore would have been oddly dislocated from the island, a site for birds to perch, but suggested the arrival of funds from international waters. It mirrors the lack of compass and mooring Trump followed in his planned expansion of hotels on a global scale. Trump’s lack of restraint and lack of mooring in imagining himself to proceed across the ocean into realty markets, entering the post-Soviet world with a supremacy free from laws of finance codes of international finance and national imaginaries.
To be sure, Tsereteli sketched the outsized majesty of a statue of Columbus before Trump proposed its arrival, but the utter lack of proportions, in its size tailored to Trump’s outsized sense of himself; its isolation from all context mirror the unmoored nature of Trump’s aims to expand his brand from and unbridled ambitions. Did the outsized desire Trump had for breaking ground in Moscow however find a perfect response in the monumental size of a statue that the sculptor must have shown Trump as he proposed to build the tallest tower in the world in Moscow? Adrift as if in international waters, making landfall in Manhattan, where he never arrived, the statute would have been improbably out of synch with its surroundings, but a monument to the lack of mooring in his overweening ambition to advance personal interests as a developer–or, more accurately, a promoter of real estate–who had increasingly promoted his projects by their gargantuan size–a size of virtually cultic significance, filling public space with a smooth-surfaced icon of absolute authority.
For Trump, size mattered most–but the promised dominance over space . that the grandiosity of the statue brought seemed posed to make it an icon demanding reverence and respect. The cartoonish nature of the grandiose version of Columbus that so rewrote the historical role of the navigator seemed to reflect the cartoonish grandiosity, in hindsight, of pursuing self-interst alone as he ventured overseas, and indeed as the disjuncture between his own elevated sense of self-interest from his political surroundings, but presented a sense of absolutism which, if not “despotic in his demeanor,” viewed the landscape with analogous regal remove and glassy gaze, akin to the neoclassical image of Putin in his judo suit, “Healthy in Mind and Body,” as an icon approaching despotism.
As much as Moscow’s mayor sought to attract capital investment to his city, was the monumental statue cast in 1991 a way of concretizing a new relation to space, reflecting an acknowledgement of the huge self-interest of the developer, as much as of squirreling Russian influence across national lines and space? Gargantuan in size and unwanted after it was cast, and only accepted by an island Columbus landed on his second voyage, the “Invention of the New World” may commemorate a new world order with parallels to the new order of end of the Soviet era, was an image of Russonationalism as much as American iconography.
Did potential delivery of the statue recognize Trump’s outsized appetites at promoting his real estate from Moscow, or forge a precedent for future relations between Trump and Russian oligarchs? The gift of this unwanted monumental sculpture to the preening real estate promoter, who placed his own interest outside precedents, was a reflection of his own aspirations to grandiosity. Indeed, it served less as a commemoration of American founding–but rehearsed the poetics of possession of Robert Frost’s “Gift Outright,”–the treacly claim infected with Manifest Destiny, expands to a canvas of land and blood, “This land was ours before we were the land’s./She was our land more than a hundred years/before we were her people. She was ours/ . . . realizing westward,/ But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,/Such as she was, such she would become,” pronounced by a past American poet laureate to inaugurate a new Augustan era of a Republic that had, by 1961, become an empire, the “ours” and “we,” as Derek Walcott put it, were not nearly “so ample and multi-hued as Whitman’s [poetic] tapestry,” written a hundred years previous before the U.S. Civil War, a landscape of manifest destiny echoed in hopes of placing an eastern-facing Columbus on the Hudson shores.
Plans for placing the monument of Columbus on Trump Properties conflated a public symbol whose universality was being contemporaneously interrogated with personal gains, of a stunt of unprecedented real estate promotion by a national symbol. Its brazen elevation of Columbus as a new King, in undemocratic fashion, elevating his figural place in a city he had never visited as a foreign emissary of majesty, unmoored from constraint and of cultish majesty.
In a city that in fact lacks many statues of such size save Lady Liberty, its placement would acknowledge the sanctioning Trump had won to promote projects of real estate in Moscow, and appeal openly to his sense of vanity. The plans for the Tower that Trump later promoted as tallest in Europe–beyond the Lakota Tower in St Petersburg–arose in 2016 after having been rebuffed for proposing a tower bearing his ever-present last name towering over the Kremlin–by 2016–inexistant, of a gigantism preserved in architectural renderings, revealing a similar aspiration to altering the Moscow skyline elevating the “Trump” brand above the city, on its ape of an entirely glass tower that he lavishly promoted as “a triumph of architecture and luxury” featuring ultra-luxury residences, taking pleasure in bringing Mammon to Moscow in the post-Soviet world.
Trump’s tour of potential real estate projects in Moscow to promote in 1996 was the preface for promoting the arrival of a monumental Columbus cast in bronze in Manhattan. The towers he proposed mirror Columbus on a huge pedestal, as a floating signifier of grandeur; the statue uncannily mirrored a monumental statue that mirrors the Tsereteli statue of Peter the Great, founder of the Russian navy and nation, whose reforms subsumed Ukraine in the early eighteenth century, of 1997, that was suggested to have been Columbus in disguise, in mockery of the failure of Tsereteli’s earlier sculpture to find an appreciative audience abroad: the grotesque monument glorifies the figure of Columbus as a law-giver removed from history, outside history, in a grandeur destined for a Trump Properties’ development pandered to an American symbolism of national identity Trump would have understood as reflective of his own grandeur.personal grandeur and the promotion of his properties.
For a man concerned only with size–and linking his own promotion of brand to brusque assertions of size.
Was the image of Columbus as open a political statement as the monument to Peter the Great, mining a dismissed American national symbol to new ideological ends? Trump seems to have appreciated the statue for its grandiosity, and he famously introduced Tsereteli to American audiences about “this great work by Zurab” in 1997, investing a familiar relation with a sculptor then largely unknown in the West as offering him the next movement after he named a tower in New York after himself: he wanted to build a tower in New York that extended beyond the tower he had named after himself, to be joined by statute taller than any statue in the Western Hemisphere.
The monument would dignify Trump Properties on the level of a state–or to suggest the bridging of the diminished importance of national frontiers in a context of global realty–and indeed the adoption of the global at the base of the old Gulf+Western building remarked as Trump International, by Columbus Circle–which he converted to a joint hotel and condominium in 1994–as if Trump Properties were a truly “international” entity. What is the scope of an image of globalism than to promote his own personal brand, and aiming to extend that brand broadly, far beyond national interests?
The fatal confusion, tied to the grandiosity of Trump International, placed Trump in his own eyes on a global stage equal to figures of state, if one that he arrived at for solely personal self-interest. The paradox was profound, and in ways revealed in proposing to place a gargantuan statue of Columbus on his development, blind to the international import of the deal, and embrace of the historical revision of Columbus as a an authoritarian figure as something that would only affirm the importance of his own size on a global marketplace, and to launch multiple dealings across the globe with little attention to national politics. (Indeed, few better images of globalization exist than a map of Trump Properties.)
Is Columbus not a preeminent figure of globalization, avant la lettre?
11. The openly authoritarian imagining of the navigator long identified with patriotic ideals was undertaken by Tsereteli as an early if telling illustration of how transactional Trump’s world-views,– and how removed they were from any sense of the recreation of political space. Indeed, the image of a Presidential authoritarianism–evident in Donald Trump’s striking familiarity with a cast of strongmen ranging from Recep Tayypi Erdoğan to Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong-Un,–all nominal Presidents, but operating with quite unfettered understandings of their offices, seem to have found an odd precedent as a model of cross-national authoritarianism, deserving perhaps of further attention and concealing many clues to the present.
Trump aimed to bring to his development on the Hudson River shore a monumental Columbus, the tallest statue in the western hemisphere, which would have cast a long shadow each and every evening across Manhattan. The monumental statue of cast bronze only recently relocated to Arecibo, Puerto Rico, casts a long shadow over the verdant island where the navigator Columbus did set foot, if dislodged from the shady international exchanges Trump sought to broker, opens a quite surprising forgotten history demands to be mapped, as we process the unbound proclamation of executive authority from the Trump White House in 2020.
The oddly stateless notion of the figure of Columbus–who moved across the Atlantic Ocean with royal privileges, to be sure, but set foot in what were previously unknown islands, which he claimed for the Spanish King in 1492, was shown as arriving at a New World. Columbus had to be sure long evoked the rational arts of cartography and global circumnavigation, becoming an emblem and figure of lettered tradition of civility, learning, and mental apprehension of the globe, figurative of the westward expansion of Empire. But in an authority beneath which a history of colonization is barely concealed, his immobile statue moves triumphantly between different worlds, not only as an emissary but the herald of a new order of things. But if Columbus was long celebrated as confirming the spherical nature of the earth–a belief increasingly in question among Americans–two percent ready to identify as strongly adhering to a doctrine of global flatness, with some ten percent unsure or skeptical–the broad acceptance of a curved earth was less contested among educated than the extent of global circumnavigation.
The discovery of Columbus as a figure of unbound authoritarianism was perhaps only made in the late twentieth century. The statue that towered above the ground, and seemed to befit the complex that contained the world’s tallest building, may well have incarnated the promise of public authority that Donald J. Trump was promised by Russian oligarchs as a suitable gift in the post-Soviet era, which might take its place as a gift from “the Russian people” on the very development that Trump must have described his hosts in great detail and with great self-satisfaction, having only recently rezoned it a residential, and imagined as a complex boating the tallest building in the world, which he planned for the old railroad yards by the Hudson River–and saw as a model for the quick negotiation of rules, precedent, and local codes of laws to which he was as if by birthright entitled as a realtor.
The poise and stature of this monumental refiguration of Columbus suggests a future able to move outside a state, or navigate stateless waters in a strikingly frictionless manner. Represented in 1892 in New York as a preeminent Renaissance figure, as if without concern of his relation to his surroundings, but to be a testimony to a removed past, but self-contained in his dignity, but affirming his role in spatial conquest in multiple ways.
The Columbus cast in the 1996 Tsereteli monument in bronze was triumphant in his ability to move outside of sovereign boundaries, demanding recognition as a vanquisher and victor who with the support of a foreign imperial ideology and faith, in the act of claiming ownership by a single gesture over a newfound land. First presented to Trump four years before he declared himself a candidate for the Presidential primary as a candidate for the Reform party in 2000, the image of such imperial identity would have provided a model for the excavation of a public sphere by entertaining a new symbolics of global empire.
Without any sense of triumphant reaction to transoceanic travel, the odd image of an impassive, idealized, “white” Columbus erases race, omits questions about his own relation to the new land of the so-called American continent or its inhabitants, and seems to have been carried by the winds that billow behind him as if to designate him as a royal Catholic emissary of a foreign land, or ensure smooth landing in port as he guides his ship across international waters by anachronistic means of a rotary wheel. The kitsch image of the monumental Columbus would be an aspiration to a global stage that Trump had aspired with Trump Intenational, but was sanctioned by his post-Soviet hosts.
Was the monumental Columbus, first commissioned from Tsereteli in 1992, a prescient image of a future President who would distinguish himself primarily by moving outside legal precedent and defining his exceptionalism to the law? The monumental statue had its origins in the post-Soviet restructuring of Moscow by he new image of Columbus, who seemed to view Columbus as an iconic symbol of a new world order after the Cold War when Luzkhov and Tsereteli had jointly arrived in America to present “The Birth of the New World” as a gift of friendship, recasting this emissary from foreign lands as a triumphant herald of a new world order. By 1997, Luzhkov’s attraction of billions of dollars into Moscow’s development, as housing complexes replaced historic buildings and the monumental Christ the Savior Cathedral was rebuilt in its gold electro-plated splendor of onion domes as seat of the Patriarch, after Stalin had destroyed the structure with dynamite in 1931, represented the intersection grandiose plans for monumentality.
12. As monuments and buildings of Luzhkov’s Moscow, long tied to embezzlement for his wife’s development business, altered the face of the Moscow, a cartoon Columbus was an apt choice of subject to curry Trump’s taste for grandiosity–and Trump’s penchant to place himself outside the law. Was the monumentalization of Columbus emissary of foreign lands, this image of a bronze Columbus cast in Russia, an oddly prescient image of a future President who has distinguished himself as working outside of legal precedent? Is it only unintentional that it echoes Trump’s ability to place his own speech as existing outside of the law–and indeed to place himself, or his invitation of a foreign government to intervene in American elections, outside the law? The sense that this Columbus travelled in international waters in new ways seems but his ability to block public or congressional testimony as U.S. President,–and his own legendary obliviousness to constraint?
The increasingly nationalist figure Columbus evokes seems a way of pandering to an audience, in “Birth of a New World,” seems a figure of sovereign authority taking command over a new world, hailing or heralding an imaginary audience with grandiosity and sovereign majesty that is not only un-American, but seems to be captured in the act of remapping global relationships in 1996, when Trump confirmed the impending arrival of the statue, shortly after he returned from Moscow, where he met the sculptor, and the man known as redefining the art of the deal signed a deal to license his name for projects of non-exclusive ownership funded by the post-Soviet government, with the promise of participating in the rebuilding of Moscow’s public space in the apparent free market of the post-Soviet era as a landscape of the flowering of capitalist construction and unprecedented building development. What Luzhkov¥ branded as a Europeanization of Moscow was criticized as a Disneyfication of nineteenth century architecture to a theme park.
Closely tied to building companies, including that of his wife, billionaire developer Yelena Baturina, Yuri Luzhkov’s restructuring of historical Moscow with a pseudo-historical opulence created a landscape rooted in replicas of rapid fabrication and hyper-development. It was typified by the restoration of the gold-gilded Christ the Saviour Cathedral, on whose site Stalin had built the monumental the Palace of Soviets on Moskva River–after having spectacularly dynamited the cathedral seat of the Patriarch, built by Tzars to celebrate Napoleon’s defeat, which Stalin in 1931 Stalin had detonated in a public spectacle commanded as a vanishing of all solid to air, and the instantaneous vanquishing of a sacro-imperial past that Stalin had sought to symbolically banish by rebuilding a site for Soviet glory.
The curious coincidence between recycling a new icon of imperial authority whose grandiosity might appease or please Trump, his Moscow projects paused or placed on hold, was nothing less than a form of bait for the developer even before his political designs would become known. Did the promise of a statue of Columbus inflate the ambitious developer to imagine his role on a truly global political stage? The notion of placing Columbus, perched atop a global map that wraps around the statue’s pedestal, provided a cartoonish rending of the world as a global play space, removed from political power or individual claims, suggesting a sort of global chess board of confrontation and domibnation, as if rewriting public memory of an inhabited public sphere.
Yuri Luzhkov’s itineraries with Tsereteli to Miami, Washington, and other American cities, as a power-broker of a new age of development, shopped around a dunification of authoritarian monumentalism with Disneyfied kitsch epitomized by the 1997 erection of a statue to Peter the Great, at the costs of $120 million, across from the Cathedral’s gold domes–a work that epitomized his bend of populism and overbearing intervention in the re-engineering of Moscow’s public space to rewrite public memory in a seat where 80% of Russia’s wealth was concentrated–with two-thirds of foreign investment; he crafted his own style of privatization with the development firm of his second wife, Intenko, promoting a new vision of Russonationalism and Russian chauvinism while guiding Moscow through the real-estate boom in which Donald Trump had landed in 1996. When Trump toured the vast underground shopping complex, Manezh, beside Red Square, as a potential site to build a hotel.
At a time when increasing capital was arriving for construction projects in Moscow, Trump offered a known model for global capital, no doubt familiar to Luzkhkov’s wife, Yelena Baturina, who exploited her husband’s office as a developer, and whose connections to organized crime has been revealed by Wikileaks. Trump claimed losses of $916 million in his 1995 tax returns, as projects failed in Atlantic City and the Plaza; he hoped to refurbish his finances by ventures in Yuri Luzhkov’s Moscow, boasting to build Trump International and a new Trump Tower–expanding the developer’s 1986 hope, about which he crowed in Art of the Deal, for “a large luxury style hotel across the street from the Kremlin” bearing his name, over resistance at erecting a skyscraper in competition with the Kremlin–a qualification of which Trump’s unbounded ambitions were perhaps not aware.
In Moscow, Trump had proposed a $250 million investment for a Trump International complex at a November 1996 news conference, bragging upon returning to New York that his ties to Luzhkov boded success in building only “quality stuff”–when he first dropped a public hint about plans for the Columbus statue. The trip to Moscow was not so climactic, for Trump International, although the trip led to attracting Russian investors only to a Trump International Beach Resort in South Florida.
One might pause, however, at this globe that Trump seems to have adopted as his new venture’s emblem, and the similarly gaudy image of a new globalism distinguishing Trump International–epitomized by the rebuilding of the enormous silvered globe encircled by orbital rings. This very globe long stood at the building Trump has rebranded as Trump International Hotel and Tower at New York’s Columbus Circle–as if the globe could provide a powerful basis of international brand that Trump could tap into having purchased the old Time-Life building at Columbus Circle, and the globe itself had come on its property.
The provision of Trump with a new image of Columbus on his Hudson Yards development would glorify his self-fashioning and marketing as a truly international developer. Was the discussion of the arrival of Tsereteli’s monumental figure of the navigator meant to hold an image of the orbital globe that Trump saw as an emblem of his new expansive network of global real estate properties beyond New York City–as if to brand the statue that was located on his properties as an icon of its aspirations to an actual globalism, and as if a statue could bolster its claims to internationality by virtue of a monumental map.
The brokering of new sites of power and monumentality were both local, and occurred on an international stage. Was the statue of Columbus that Luzhkov brought to America nothing less than a bid to rewrite the memory of the navigator as a figure of the place of commerce in the globalized world. The monumentalization of the voyage of discovery installed eventually in Puerto Rico in 2016, on the eve of the Trump Presidency, hinted at a new image of authoritarianism to come, blurred and with soft edges: in casting a Christopher Columbus on steroids as an emissary of royal Catholic majesty, he seems almost an emissary of a new global order. If a relic of the rebuilding of Moscow under the Luzhkov’s corrupt mayoralty, when billions arrived in Moscow for rebuilding d to the awarding of building and development contracts often tied to Intenko, his wife billionaire wife Yelena Baturina’s real estate company, over the eighteen years he held power since 1992 in Moscow, rewriting the past by the free market, this unmoored Columbus, arms elevated in apparent victory, offered a disturbingly authoritarian image, inaugurating hidden financial exchanges in a new global era of illicit international transfers and underwater financial transactions.
This Columbus seems dressed in neoclassical robes to bolster his authority, and anachronistically cast as guiding his craft by a rotary wheel, but as an emissary of sovereign right, who claims a pride of place as existing outside any legal code or precedent. The evocation of such a figure of extra-legal majesty, and truly transnational authority, seems crafted from a symbolics of authoritarianism, dear to a devout sculptor who would specialize in Neo-imperial statuary, who had already reclad Tsar Peter the Great in Roman robes in a strikingly similar sculpture.
While no-one imagined at the time that Trump boasted to all who would listen that he had negotiated the arrival of such a statue that Trump would be United States President, the “gift” he announced was conveyed from the Russia people moved outside international laws. At the time, his own global ambitions as an hotelier drew attention post-Soviet society. And the approach, made by Moscow’s Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, cast an icon of patriotism in the guise of authoritarian nationalism, recasting the iconic figure of American nationalism in a sovereign fashion removed from legal precedent, democratic practice, or inclusive politics.
In deeply disturbing ways, the combination of self-interest and public interest, or the inability to distinguish self-interest and public interest, that is so characteristic of a Trump Presidency, seems encapsulated, before the fact, by the cloaking of the proposed arrival of this massive monument, whose height he specified as greater than the Statue of Liberty from the base of its pediment to torch, on a proposed riverside development on the Hudson, as a marker of personal and national grandiosity. The “gift” he claimed to convey from the “Russian people” would serve as an adornment to his projected properties, and elided international politics with international commerce of undisclosed nature, but touching on tax-free transfers of goods and cash, in ways that turned on a figure–the fifteenth-century navigator–who acted outside any body of laws, but as the emissary of a sovereign decree, in ways that were already disturbing to be seen as a basis for national identity.
The model was already presented as a gift to the United States when in 1992 Moscow’s new elected populist mayor Luzhkov proposed gifting the statue for the Columbus quincentennial, its size larger than the statue of Peter the Great would assume when it was erected in 1997 in Moscow, which assumed such status as an evacuation of public space. As billions of dollars entered Moscow–$4.6 billion of foreign investments in 1996–the monument that did not provoke engagement with the past but propose a traditional model of global authority suggest a distraction, a worthy precedent for Trump’s late massive monument of a border wall. As Columbus in “The Birth of the New World” seems to obscure all else to fill the fragmenting of the post-soviet state, the public statuary seeks not to create a new innocence and stability, in a time of uncertain post-Soviet social order, but a celebration of identity removed from social improvement, or from meaningful political action and inclusiveness.
Trump was eager to promote the promised arrival of the monumental statue to media outlets when he returned from surveying real estate prospects in post-Soviet Moscow, boasting about his contacts with the affable Georgian sculptor who had won the Lenin Prize and was awarded Hero of Socialist Labor. As much as only an artist, the sculptor Trump treated with customary familiarity by praising “this great work of Zurab” as a gift that it “would be my honor if we could work it out with the city of New York” manufactured his own authority as an international intermediary in ways that omitted that “Zurab” was not only an artist, but a bit of a figure of state, who identified his work as an artist as a Hero of Socialist Labour who designed war memorials, and statues in Soviet embassies throughout the world; since 1997 was President of the Russian Academy of Arts, offering multiple post-Soviet monuments including for 9/11 to other countries on behalf of the state.
And what better place to position the image of the fifteenth-century royal navigator than to detract attention from the Enlightenment inheritance of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the People, over which it would tower from the perspective of Trump Properties, in the New York skyline? It is telling that if Tsereteli’s later contribution of a statuary honoring 9/11, “Tear of Grief,” located in Bayonne, NJ, is situated in a site where it is seem before the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor–as if to redefine public political space and to take the place of the Statue of Liberty as the image that defined the visual experience of all who arrived in New York Harbor, rewriting the experience of universal ideals with mourning and global fears. The monument that used steel from a former Soviet military factory located in a Soviet “secret city” called Dzerzhinsk, suggesting its tie to a project of national calculations as much as a generous gift.
While artworks are branded an autonomous aesthetic status, the placement of Teresteli statues in embassies and consulates in Brazil, Portugal, and Japan, suggest we examine their role as an art of state. The promoting of the Russian-Georgian sculptor’s work transformed a relatively obscure Georgian artist to a figure of state in the post-Soviet era, as millions of tax dollars were pilfered to instal his folk-like sculptures in Moscow’s public spaces, imbuing with a false populism that suggests reproductions of kitsch inscribed with globalist ideals. The image of creating a new space of public admiration was central to Tsereteli’s works of art. “Make way, rogues of political blackmail,” reads a 1997 inscription on his monumental statue to Peter the Great, for founding a navy that was used to invade Ukraine, “Welcome the ship which has sailed into the eye of a grand Moscow scandal./ At the head of the tiny vessel . . . /Stand Peter in bronze!” The glorified elevation of its vision of authoritarian identitarian politics, familiar to post-Soviet Moscow as a new glue of public space, suggested a symbolics of political unity that Trump may well have taken as a model for global politics.
The attention-getting image of Columbus as a glorified authoritarian figure, to stand beside Manhattan in the Hudson, may have been far to heavy to be supported by the landfill of Trump Properties. The statue, weighing in at approximately 6,500 tons of sheer bronze, would not be likely to be supported by the landfill Trump had rezoned for residences. Rather than most solid metal sculptures built in Moscow, where a similar image of Peter the Great was erected in 1997, the image of Columbus would be hard to support. But the monument whose imminent arrival of which Trump boasted as an adornment to his most recent developent reveals a complex entangling of symbolic icons, redefining public spaces, and personal gain,
Musings on Maps 