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# Presidential portraits in the Oval Office and Trump's choice of Andrew Jackson
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/est-v-ssha-traditsiia-demonstrativnogo-dialoga-prezidentov-s-predshestvennikami-cherez-obrashchenie-k-ikh-istoricheskim-obrazam-ili-kharakternym-dlia-toi-epokhi-trendam/
- Published: 2024-06-07T13:11:35.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:46:39.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Mores, Society

There is a tradition in the USA of presidents staging a demonstrative dialogue with their predecessors by invoking their historical images or the trends characteristic of their era. Every new president rearranges the Oval Office and adds a few details, down to changing the colour of the carpet, but chiefly, through works of art, sets out a sort of programme for his coming presidency. Everyone watches which portrait the new president hangs in his office, and tries to guess what he has in mind.

It is an amusing tradition. Then again, even at the stage of the election manifesto it is usually clear which values this or that candidate leans towards, and hanging a portrait of one of his 45 colleagues hardly tells us anything new at a deeper level. Still, various mishaps do occur.

Dwight Eisenhower was an admirer of George Washington, Lyndon Johnson revered Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Clinton namedropped John Kennedy, Obama preferred to preen himself in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln, and Biden assembled an entire deck of portraits and bronze busts: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the civil rights activists Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez.

As for Donald Trump, his statement, as usual, turned out to be scandalous. He hung beside him a portrait of Andrew Jackson, having extolled throughout the whole campaign Jackson's swaggering nationalism and insurgent populism, while his opponents agreed that Trump and Jackson were alike, but for opposite reasons, condemning Trump's chauvinism, xenophobia and fanaticism.

Thus Jackson became an instrument for propagating contradictory notions of America's historical legacy and national character. For on the one hand Jackson was a political reformer, a strong leader and a representative of the new establishment, who preserved the Union, defended the interests of the working man and, as no one else had, strengthened the prosperity of the United States. On the other hand, Jackson is remembered as an isolationist, a populist and an intolerant misogynist