The President’s Piques, er Plaques

The President’s Piques er Plaques

I guess it is now the tradition that the president needs not be dignified. I, among others, used to say that while I may not respect the person who occupies that office, I respect the office itself. Maybe that no longer applies. With me, the respect for the office ended with Bill Clinton. But John Kennedy was widely known to have cheated on Jackie with affairs with Marilyn Monroe and Judith Exner among others. Everyone knows about Bill Clinton’s peccadillos. Joe Biden is forever tarnished by his open borders policies, the inflation and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. But what about the current occupant, Donald J, Trump? 

I would bet a year’s salary that Trump will go down in history as the least dignified person to ever hold the office of president. His personal behavior has overshadowed his significant accomplishments. I know that his most avid supporters pooh-pooh his rudeness, bellicosity and ill temper but don’t you think he would be more effective if he toned it down a bit and shut off the tweeting for a while? Do you think that even his supporters would encourage such a behavior in their friends and in their children? Maybe it is a sign of the times where rudeness and lack of decorum are trendy. Then the president is just setting an example for our youth on how to be rude and crude.

The latest sign of this lack of dignity is the president’s wording on the presidential plaques at the White House. The president has installed a presidential wall in the West Wing’s colonnade. Under the portrait of each president is a plaque describing that individual. Instead of usual bland historical summaries, the president has seen fit to inscribe his feelings about some of his predecessors. Not unexpected is his referring to President Biden as “Sleepy Joe” saying that “Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American history.” 

I actually disagree with that assessment. Historians usually credit James Buchanan as the worst president. But for me the worst presidents in history are Andrew Jackson (who Trump admires) and Woodrow Wilson. Trump uses President Obama’s middle name (Hussein) and calls him “one of the most divisive political figures in American History” (more divisive than Abraham Lincoln or Trump himself?) and says he passed “the highly ineffectual ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act.” In a show of bipartisanship, Trump also takes a swipe at George Bush the Second saying the Bush presidency was “largely defined by the events of Sept. 11, 2001” and that Bush “started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which should not have happened.” Bill Clinton’s reads that “scandals plagued his presidency” and “In 2016, President Clinton’s wife, Hillary Clinton, lost the Presidency to President Donald J. Trump!”

The president who has lusted openly about being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize omitted that recognition from the plaques of Presidents Wilson, Carter and Obama. Even the Babylon Bee had a turn saying “Trump hard at work coming up with insulting plaque for Rutherford B. Hayes” and that he was “having even more trouble coming up with a good plaque for Warren G. Harding.”

The president’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt sounded like a proud mother praising the artwork of her second grader when she 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.” Translated that sounded like “Little Donny has again shown his wonderful ability to express himself and show why he is at the top of his second grade class.”