In one of many extra revealing acts of his second time period, President Donald Trump has turned the outside of the White Home right into a car for grievance.
The Trump White Home has put in a sequence of latest plaques alongside what it calls the “Presidential Walk of Fame,” an exhibit within the colonnade that pairs portraits of U.S. presidents with written summaries of their administrations. In principle, it’s a historic show—however it reads extra like a petty partisan manifesto—one which flatters Trump lavishly whereas mocking his current Democratic predecessors and selling long-debunked falsehoods about their presidencies.
“Trump rewrites history” by Mike Luckovich
The challenge additionally suits right into a broader effort by the Trump administration to reshape official narratives elsewhere in authorities—from proposed modifications to Smithsonian displays to revisions of Nationwide Park Service supplies and Pentagon-linked historical past web sites—usually blurring the road between historic interpretation and political messaging.
The plaques, which had been mounted beneath portraits already on show, range sharply in tone relying on the topic’s celebration—effusive and self-congratulatory for Trump, overtly derisive for Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
“The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each President and the legacy they left behind,” she stated in a press release. “As a student of history, many were written directly by the President himself.”
That authorship reveals.
The plaque beneath Biden’s portrait—changed, conspicuously, with an autopen stand-in—refers to him as “Sleepy Joe Biden” and declares him “the worst President in American History.” It additionally accuses Biden of “severe mental decline,” references the “Biden Crime Family,” and blames unnamed “Radical Left handlers” for operating the nation in his stead.
Biden’s plaque clearly has Trump written throughout it.
It additionally asserts that Biden took workplace “as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States,” reviving Trump’s false claims in regards to the 2020 election.
The plaque even references Biden’s poor efficiency within the 2024 debate, stating that after his “humiliating debate loss to President Trump,” he was “forced to withdraw from his campaign for re-election in disgrace.”
Obama’s plaque follows an identical sample. It makes use of his full identify—“Barack Hussein Obama,” a formulation lengthy favored in right-wing circles—and calls him “one of the most divisive figures in American history.” It describes the Reasonably priced Care Act because the “highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act,” criticizes the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris local weather accords, and repeats Trump’s conspiracy principle that Obama “spied” on his 2016 marketing campaign and orchestrated the “Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.”
Notably absent is any acknowledgment that Obama stays essentially the most favorably considered dwelling former president.
Different former presidents fare considerably higher—although not with no Trumpian twist. Invoice Clinton’s plaque pivots to the truth that Trump defeated his spouse, Hillary Clinton, in 2016.
Jimmy Carter’s entry is extra charitable, noting the inflation and financial pressure of his presidency earlier than including that he was extensively seen as extra profitable after leaving workplace, citing his humanitarian work.
Ronald Reagan’s plaque, in contrast, is glowing, concluding with the assertion that “he was a fan of President Donald J. Trump long before President Trump’s Historic run for the White House. Likewise, President Trump was a fan of his!”
Trump’s personal plaques are, unsurprisingly, triumphalist. The entry for his first time period credit him with every part from “the Largest Tax Cuts in History” to constructing “the Greatest Economy in the History of the World.” The second-term plaque boasts of sweeping tariffs, hard-line immigration insurance policies, the elimination of “Critical Race Theory and transgender insanity from public schools,” and the banning of “men from women’s sports.”
It additionally touts initiatives nonetheless underway—or fully symbolic—together with the development of a “Golden Dome missile defense shield,” renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and the addition of a brand new White Home ballroom.
The entry closes on a well-recognized chorus: “THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”
Response on Capitol Hill has ranged from discomfort to outright irritation. Even many Republicans appeared uneasy with the show.
Even Sen. Lindsey Graham isn’t happy with Trump’s distraction.
“I’m really disturbed by that,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska instructed NBC.
Even Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one in every of Trump’s most dependable allies, waved it off as a distraction.
“I don’t think that’s going to move the ball for us,” Graham stated. “There may be some amusement there. But the bottom line is, if we lose the House, he’s going to get impeached. We need to focus on fixing people’s problems.”
The plaques are simply the newest bodily imprint Trump has left on the White Home. They sit close to the redesigned Rose Backyard and adjoining to the East Wing, which was demolished to make means for a deliberate 90,000-square-foot ballroom—an addition that preservationists warn may overwhelm the historic mansion.
Taken as an entire, the plaques say much less in regards to the presidents they describe than in regards to the one who commissioned them. Trump’s White Home is being reshaped to replicate his instincts—turning even its partitions into instruments for grievance and self-praise.
