Trump’s Plaques on the Presidential ‘Walk of Fame,’ Fact-Checked and Annotated by Historians
The write-ups for the recent presidents, starting with Trump, are, depending on your perspective, either comically or infuriatingly inappropriate for official copy from the White House.
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This is not true.
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A common stylistic device of Trump is the choice to ignore standard capitalization rules. For example, words such as cities, inflation, and energy would not be capitalized typically.
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He’s built nothing. He’s simply torn down the East Wing.
The smearing of President Biden is largely recycled campaign vitriol.
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There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
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The autopen was judged many years ago to be a legal way to affix the president’s signature.
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This reads like a campaign polemic of the worst sort, with little concern for decorum or accuracy.
Not a landslide, and Trump lost the popular vote by about three million.
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His self-assessment would lead someone to believe the American military had declined, which it clearly had not.
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While the U.S. economy saw growth during the first three years of Trump’s first term, the Covid-19 pandemic led to a severe contraction of the economy. Unemployment rose sharply, as did inflation.
Trump insists on using Obama’s middle name, evidently because he regards it as a way to besmirch him.
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The tone and content of the captions for several recent presidents, especially the Democrats, is self-evidently skewed, gratuitously nasty and wildly out of place for an official government display.
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This is a mish-mash of falsehoods.
Trump seems to be torn between trying to give credit to Bush for conservative policies he passed (tax cuts) and wanting to indict him as part of the Republican establishment that Trump dethroned.
I find it somewhat surprising that Trump doesn’t attack Clinton more, given his harshness toward Biden and Obama.
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He does not mention that NAFTA, too, passed only because of significant Republican support. Trump also is highly misleading in saying that he “terminated” NAFTA. Trump did modify it, though almost all accounts regard those modifications as minor.
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The plaques are frequently self-referential. This framing includes repeated mentions of Trump himself in citations that appear in the Biden, Obama, Clinton, Reagan, Cleveland and Jackson plaques.
This version of presidential history doesn’t credit Republican presidents with policies disliked by Trump. George H.W. Bush signed the initial version of NAFTA.
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Given the preferences of MAGA history, it is no surprise that this label leaves out Justice David Souter, a moderate.
President Reagan’s policies and efforts certainly helped bring an end to the Cold War, but he alone did not “win” the decades long conflict. Reagan’s seven immediate predecessors, along with the implosion of the Soviet economy and the policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, also contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, which occurred during the presidency of George H.W. Bush.
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Reagan also cut tariffs; led, with his close ally Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, the process that led to U.S.-Canada free trade; and promoted the virtues of immigration from around the world. There is also no reference to the budget deficit produced by these tax cuts that led to a later series of subtle tax increases under Reagan.
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The reference to him confronting the Soviet Union “with striking moral clarity” is noteworthy given the Trump administration’s transactional approach to international relations.
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It is hard to credit this mutual fandom. As a businessman, Trump was a vocal critic of Reagan’s foreign policy in the 1980s. In 2020, the Reagan Foundation asked the Trump re-election campaign and the R.N.C. to stop using Ronald Reagan’s likeness to fund-raise and opposed the issue of a coin with Reagan’s face paired with Trump’s. With the exception of a shared commitment to tax cuts, Trump and Reagan saw the world very differently.
A more accurate statement would be that Carter signed agreements transferring control of the canal zone to Panama.
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Finally, I can give Trump credit for one generous sentence about a Democratic president.
Pardons, except those granted by Democrats, are always brave.
Law and Order was actually his main plank when Nixon ran for president in 1968, not in 1972.
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Most historians consider Watergate to be the central and defining part of Nixon’s presidency. Trump is out of step with both historical and popular opinion in relegating it to a near afterthought.
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This doesn’t mention the investigative and impeachment processes that unearthed what by 1974 had destroyed Nixon’s credibility. When the coverup of multiple crimes came to light, Nixon lost his own party and Americans, who learned that he had used the federal government to go after his enemies, something the current White House clearly doesn’t see as a reason to resign.
One could quibble with a few things here, but this is surprisingly accurate and neutral.
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Given Trump’s focus on immigration, it’s remarkable that the plaque is silent on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended the quota system and promoted immigration based on family ties — precisely the kinds of measures the president has vigorously and vocally opposed.
This seems to be the fairest and most positive evaluation of any recent Democratic president. I have to think it was partly a nod to R.F.K. Jr., Trump’s H.H.S. secretary, who would presumably have been offended if his uncle had been trashed the way Obama and Biden were.
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The plaque is silent about J.F.K.’s escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam as well as his (and really Jackie’s) promotion of the arts and renovation of the White House, both of which look rather different under Trump.
With someone like John F. Kennedy, he puts in capital letters that he championed tax cuts, capital T-C. Trump capitalizes things like tax cuts, tariffs, pardons. Yet with someone like Eisenhower, he won’t capitalize the “interstate highway system” or “balanced budget” or “enforced the desegregation.”
Perhaps a slight hint here of Trump’s obsession with the “deep state,” a conspiratorial term for the federal bureaucracy.
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A four-term president gets much less space than a two-term Donald Trump who so far has only been in office five years.
This is misleading. Hoover in fact resisted doing more to fight the Depression, especially in terms of public spending, and F.D.R.’s New Deal was overwhelmingly a repudiation of Hoover’s more laissez-faire approach.
Coolidge was in Trump parlance a “tariff guy.” However, he never proposed original, higher tariffs as U.S. president. All he did was uphold the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922.
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The plaque says nothing about the racist and restrictionist policies that flowed from it.
The flagrant omission here is the Teapot Dome scandal. For a half-century, Teapot Dome was synonymous with presidential wrongdoing, until Nixon and Watergate took the mantle. It’s strange that Trump doesn’t mention it at all.
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Yes, we’re getting the picture. The successful G.O.P. presidents were just like Trump (high tariffs, cutting taxes, slashing immigration, etc.).
I would say more about Wilson’s success on the domestic policy front, for example, which was unprecedented, and also highlight the importance of the Allied victory in WWI, for which Wilson deserves immense credit. But overall this isn’t a bad entry.
Trump’s account makes it seem that this was a constant position of Taft’s, but in fact he had run for president on cutting tariffs and disappointed many by acquiescing in a new tariff bill.
Very pro-Theodore Roosevelt, but nothing that’s wrong.
The caption is almost entirely about tariffs — no mention, for example, of establishing the gold standard, which was really the big issue of the 1896 campaign. There is also the fact that the tariffs are widely seen as having been a failure and that in his second term, McKinley was much less “a tariff man” than before.
He’s trying to show that Tariffs with a capital T are what smart presidents have done before.
Inclusion of the Pendleton Act is extraordinary given the Trump administration’s hostility to non-partisan expertise and its penchant for hiring based on personal and political loyalty.
Odd to mention this without any hint of whether it’s good or bad, especially because Trump is surprisingly positive about Lincoln, Grant and others for their actions on behalf of Black equality.
Many of these start with nicknames. It’s sort of cheap shorthand that plays into that nickname game Trump likes.
The plaque is silent on Johnson’s opposition to the 14th Amendment . Given that Trump’s own interests have intersected with the 14th Amendment — not only in his challenge to the citizenship clause in Section 1, but in legal proceedings related to the incitement of insurrection or rebellion in Section 3 — it’s a notable omission.
Lincoln wouldn’t recognize the current G.O.P. Whereas the party of Lincoln’s time advocated tariffs and westward settlement, it also encouraged immigration and the rights of existing immigrants and was fully committed to federal infrastructure projects, notably the transcontinental railroad, and to nonpartisan assistance to institutions of higher learning.
This is another entry that seems hastily done, insufficiently explained. Do we feel confident Trump knows what “Bleeding Kansas” refers to? It’s easy to imagine that with some of these entries, Trump or an aide was just copying notes and facts from somewhere but not thinking through what to say about them.
The current White House mentions the Fugitive Slave Act, which established national enforcement of a law to kidnap and return escaped enslaved persons found in free States to slavery, as if it’s a good thing. It was a horrific thing, but perhaps for some in the president’s circle, this inhuman 19th century national enforcement system was deemed a useful precedent for ICE.
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Trump says that Fillmore defended the Monroe Doctrine, but Fillmore’s understanding of the Monroe Doctrine is quite different from Trump’s. Fillmore opposed U.S. annexations.
His proslavery politics and eventual defection to the Confederacy go unmentioned.
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This entry seems especially lacking in context. It’s hard to think that someone unfamiliar with Whig/Democratic conflicts of the 1830s and 1840s would know what to make of this caption.
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Trump manages to rope John Tyler in as a pro-tariff man even though he approved a hike in rates very reluctantly.
Trump insists on abiding by the current G.O.P. refusal to say “Democratic Party,” even when writing about a president from the 1830s!
People’s President gets capitalized, but not the common man.
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This is yet another instance of the project’s self-referential and self-absorptive framing.
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Jackson supported the radical expansion of voting rights, but so far as I know there was no federal law or presidential action that did so. Then, as now, rules about voting were set by the states.
Trump’s summary is correct as far as it goes, but his administration has twisted the policy into the so-called “Donroe Doctrine.” The Monroe doctrine was explicitly anti-imperialist, stating that the United States would not tolerate interference by the Old World imperial powers in the Western Hemisphere. Trump’s “doctrine” is imperialist, justifying U.S. authority to interfere with the sovereign nations of the hemisphere however it pleases.
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Monroe never officially purchased Florida. The U.S. government promised Madrid that it would amicably settle any claims Americans citizens had against Spain. But the transactional Trump thinks in terms of acreage again.
The number of times Trump mentions tariffs throughout these captions is extraordinary. In fact, as I go through, I note that tariffs and land expansion seem to be his most remarked upon issues.
If you’re going to say he forever changed the course of history because of his immortal words that “all men are created equal,” then you should also mention that he did so by setting a powerful standard that he didn’t fully believe in. He didn’t believe that Black men were created equal; let alone women, white or Black. The current White House had a chance here — but didn’t take it — to acknowledge that the pursuit of freedom by Americans only started in 1776 and has not been a straight line. Our history is complex but acknowledging its complexity shouldn’t be considered inconsistent with loving our country and revering its founders.
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There’s no social spending in 1801, so the current White House likely doesn’t realize that here it is celebrating the slashing of federal defense spending by Jeffersonians.
The big absence here is the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, passed by the Federalist Congress, signed by Adams, and aimed directly at suppressing the political opposition led by Jefferson and Madison — what Jefferson called the “reign of witches.” It’s all the more curious as Trump has seized upon the only one of these acts that is still on the books, the Alien Enemies Act, to justify his mass deportations.
The plaque omits that Washington personally led the suppression of an armed militia-style insurrection against the new federal government, the so-called Whiskey Rebellion, in 1794. In a display of mercy, and to avoid being perceived as a despot, he pardoned the rebels but he did not condone their lawlessness, let alone praise them as patriots. And Washington, of course, had nothing to do with instigating or inciting the insurrection.
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Trump likely believes that President Washington erected tariffs. He did not. Washington supported Congressional action to set and erect the country’s first tariff. As Trump learned from the Supreme Court after this label was written, this particular nuance has major Constitutional significance!
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George Washington receives the ultimate Trump A-List celebrity treatment earning “Great” and “Greatest” in one 16-word sentence.