"... portraits of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Abraham Lincoln, James Monroe and Franklin D. Roosevelt are also on the walls. Mr. Trump has ruminated about the fate of Mr. Harrison, who died shortly after he was inaugurated, to people who have visited the Oval Office. He has said that the portraits of his predecessors are there to remind him of how quickly fate can change. Most other presidents had just a few portraits or scenery paintings in the Oval...."
From
"'He’s a Maximalist': Inside Trump’s Gilded Oval Office/The New York Times recreated the president’s office in 3-D, using hundreds of photos taken in October" (NYT)(gift link, for all the photos
1. The NYT calls the photos "3-D," but they're not 3-D. They are 360°. I think the correct term is "360° panoramas."
2. This article is respectful toward Trump, an effort at objectivity, though of course the comments over there are anti-Trump — "Fool’s gold, in every sense," etc.
3. The "maximalist" characterization comes from Karoline Leavitt: "Why all the gold? 'He’s a maximalist,' Ms. Leavitt said, citing Mr. Trump’s background in real estate and hospitality. 'So he loves showing people who come in, the renovations, his office, his gift shop.'"
4. The "gift shop" isn't a shop. As the
link on the phrase shows, it's a gift room, a small room off the Oval Office that Presidents have used for different purposes, that Trump uses to house a supply of hats and other items to hand out as gifts. And yes, this is the room where Bill Clinton consorted with Monica Lewinsky.
5. I'm delighted to see the name William Henry Harrison. I was just talking about him yesterday. Off blog. I've been slowly making my way through
this biography of John Quincy Adams (commission earned). I'd finally made it to Chapter 35:
IN THE YEARS AFTER ADAMS LOST HIS BID TO BE REELECTED president, the slave states and their allies had controlled the White House, as they did the Congress and the Supreme Court.... Finally, in 1840, the Whigs had broken through, in the person not of Clay, the perennial candidate, but of William Henry Harrison. Adams was inclined to dismiss Harrison as a genial buffoon, an 'Indian fighter' like Jackson who had been puffed up into presidential material by the popular fancy for war heroes....
Then, on April 4, one month after taking the oath of office, Harrison died of pneumonia caused by a cold he had contracted at his inaugural. He was succeeded by John Tyler [who]... had been included as vice president in order to shore up party support in the slave states.
6. And here's the part that I clipped out and texted to Meade and to my son Chris (who reads bios of Presidents and had sent me this book):
It had never crossed anyone’s mind that he would exercise power of any sort; no president had ever died in office. No one even knew how to address the successor; the Constitution was unclear on whether the vice president would succeed to the presidency or merely assume its functions. Adams was outraged that Tyler considered himself the president and insisted on being addressed as such.
I had never seen that idea before, the notion that when a President dies, the VP does not become the President. How dare Tyler expect to be called Mr. President!
7. But back to the present day and to Trump with that picture of William Henry Harrison hanging alongside all the far greater Presidents. Trump keeps Harrison on the wall as a memento mori. We know that because he talks about it to people. He "has ruminated" aloud about the President who's known for dropping dead. We tend not to think of Trump as a person given to rumination — about anything, certainly not death.
8. Now, looking at those pictures of the Oval Office, maximally ornamented in gold, I think perhaps he sees the place as something like a tomb. Perhaps he envisions a chamber in the soon-to-come Trump library that looks something like this:
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