Donald Trump has become the incredible shrinking President. He seems to shrink by the day, more the embodiment of a lack of impulse control than the occupant of the White House Oval Office. Or, should we now say, Golden Oval Office. Once upon there was a de facto President’s club where Presidents often (not always) respected past occupants.
Enter Donald Trump’s “Presidential Walk of Fame.” He outraged many when for Joe Biden’s portrait he put up a picture of an auto pen (never mind that Trump himself has used the autopen). Now he has put insulting plaques beneath the portraits on Barack Obama and Joe Biden (the autopen that is).
White House staff updated the so-called “Presidential Walk of Fame” Wednesday by adding lengthy descriptions of each former president, in rhetoric that aligns with President Donald Trump’s – such as calling former President Joe Biden “the worst President in American History.”
As part of the president’s ongoing effort to customize the White House to his liking, Trump set his well-known opinions of each former president in stone by adding plaques underneath the portraits that now hang along the colonnade.
But rather than neutrally describing each president, Trump chose to invoke more color – claiming former President Barack Obama is “one of the most divisive political figures” and asserting former President Ronald Reagan “was a fan.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each President and the legacy they left behind. As a student of history, many were written directly by the President himself.”
“Sleepy Joe was, by far, the worst President in American History,” the plaque underneath Biden’s portrait, which is an autopen as opposed to his official portrait, reads. “Taking office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States.”
As part of Obama’s description, the White House wrote: “As President, he passed the highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act, resulting in his party losing control of both Houses of Congress, and the Election of the largest House Republican majority since 1946.”
For former President Bill Clinton, the White House attributed his legislative successes to “Republicans in Congress,” and boasted that Trump terminated the North American Free Trade Agreement, the trade deal struck under Clinton. The White House also included a line about how Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election in Bill Clinton’s description.
And, of course, Trump continues to refer to Biden as Sleepy Joe when Trump is nodding off while at work more than I did in high school. And that’s a lot.
It’s just one more demeaning act of a petty man who thrives on hatred and resentment.
Each morning we wake up and before looking at the news wonder: Can Donald Trump sink any lower?
The answer is almost always Yes. Definitely. Absolutely.
Like nobody has ever seen before.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.