Newly installed plaques summarizing the legacies as interpreted by the Trump White House of former U.S. presidents Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush are shown along the colonnade on Wednesday.Win McNamee/Getty Images
Apparently not content with altering the contemporary American political landscape, Donald Trump is accelerating his assault on the future of the past.
With this week’s installation of commemorative plaques under portraits of former presidents, Mr. Trump is attempting to shape historical views of his predecessors, selecting some for opprobrium, others for praise. And while professional historians employ myriad factors in their judgment on a president’s performance – his stewardship of the economy, for example, or his conduct of foreign relations – Mr. Trump often views earlier chief executives through an unusual prism, summarized in a song Big Bird once sang on Sesame Street: “I like you, you like me.”
Thus the plaque under the portrait of Ronald Reagan in the White House’s new Presidential Walk of Fame – a kind of Washington version of the star-studded Hollywood Walk of Fame – notes that the 47th president admires the 40th, because “he was a fan of President Donald J. Trump before President Trump’s historic run for the White House.” The plaque goes on to say, “Likewise, President Trump was a fan of his!” – an ironic addition given the contretemps involving Mr. Trump’s objection to Ontario’s use of Mr. Reagan’s anti-tariff words in a television advertisement.
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All of the President’s predecessors are represented in portraits framed in this administration’s trademark gold, though Joe Biden is portrayed by a photograph of an autopen, a reference to Mr. Trump’s contention that he didn’t sign documents himself. The Biden plaque begins, “Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History,” and asserts that he was responsible for a “series of unprecedented disasters that brought our Nation to the brink of destruction.”
A 2022 Siena College Research Institute survey of presidential historians and experts placed Andrew Johnson (president, 1865-69) last, James Buchanan (1857-61) second to last and Mr. Trump third to last after his first term. It ranked Mr. Biden in the relative middle, 19th best (or, conversely, 26th worst).
The display speaks of Barack Hussein Obama – a locution his critics often use to suggest that he is a Muslim and not a Christian – as “one of the most divisive political figures in American history,” ignoring his continuing high approval ratings by Americans. George W. Bush is credited with creating the Department of Homeland Security, but also as having “started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which should not have happened.” Another plaque blasts Jimmy Carter for high inflation and unemployment but says of his postpresidential work, “He did wonderful things for Humanity!”
A plaque dedicated to Mr. Obama at the White House.Aaron Schwartz/Reuters
The unveiling of the installation in a well-trafficked colonnade, running to the presidential family’s residence from the West Wing, is the latest effort by Mr. Trump to shape the American past to his inclinations and impulses.
In a March executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” the President began a battle against what he called “a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” branding contemporary historians as a vanguard that “seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”
As a result, in national museums, historic sites and federal documents, moments of dissent and controversy have been altered to play down, and in many cases eliminate, references to the efforts of minorities and women to join the American mainstream and achieve the rights of others.
This campaign, decried by mainstream historians, museum curators and even national park superintendents, has not been confined to the United States.
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Commemorative panels honouring the Black military personnel who fought abroad during the Second World War for freedoms that they were denied at home have been removed from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, spawning an uproar among Dutch people that prompted Joe Popolo, the American ambassador, to visit the site this autumn and post a social-media message saying, “The exhibitions in Margraten are not intended to promote an agenda critical of America.”
Though Mr. Trump’s perspective is unusual, what’s not unusual for presidents is to be preoccupied with history – and with their own places in it. That preoccupation often surfaces in a second term, when they work as much to shape and seal their legacies as to govern the country.
Many presidents find they begin to meditate on history especially when living in the White House, which since John Adams occupied the structure has been the site of countless moments in history.
In a 1962 article in American Heritage magazine, John F. Kennedy – marked by substantial childhood reading about the past – called history “the memory of a nation” that provides “the means by which a nation establishes its sense of identity and purpose.” He argued that a country’s history “is a statement of the values and hopes which, having forged what has gone before, will now forecast what is to come.”
Portraits of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush with plaques of text below in the colonnade of the White House.Mark Schiefelbein/The Associated Press
George W. Bush, who read 186 books (many of them history) in his final three years as president, told the pupils of Nashville’s East Literature Magnet High School in 2002 that “ours is a history of freedom,” explaining – in terms at odds with the Trump view – that “whether it’s been in the Revolutionary War, or the heroic struggle to end slavery, or civil rights wars in the United States Congress, or whether it’s World War II where we fought to free people from tyranny, the history of this nation has been a history of freedom and justice.”
Current White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described Mr. Trump, not generally known as a voracious reader, as “a student of history” and said that many of the critiques “were written directly by the President himself.”
Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for Mr. Trump’s The Art of the Deal, once said, “I suspect he’s never read a book in his adult life.”
Even so, the plaques reflect an authentic reflection of the President’s perspective and his language.
The two Trump plaques, for example, speak of his having created “the Greatest Economy in the History of the World” and winning the presidency in a “landslide.” Neither of his victories qualify for the 60-per-cent level of vote that political professionals use to define a landslide.