Trump demands new presidential portrait despite old one remaining secret

President Donald Trump wants the Smithsonian to create a new presidential portrait of himself, even though his old portrait has not yet been revealed to the public.

Trump officials say artist Ronald Sherr’s portrait only represents his first term and he wants a new work that captures his entire time in office, according to The New York Times. Additionally, the National Portrait Gallery traditionally only hangs presidential portraits after a president has permanently left office. When the institution accepted Sherr’s work in 2022 (shortly after the artist’s death), Trump had already announced his upcoming 2024 election campaign.

The Times also hinted there are additional reasons for Trump’s refusal to accept the portrait, although these remain obscure to the public. All that is known as Sherr and Trump described it as showing him at his "most energized and presidential."

This is not the first time Trump has taken a hands-on approach toward either his official portraits or Washington D.C.’s most famous series of museums. Last month the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump asked for his official White House portrait be printed with a golden border so it could “glimmer” in the light.

"The reprint required metallic gold ink and a specialized printer,” the report claimed, adding “it delayed the completion of the portraits, some of which had already been printed with a more understated white border, according to an internal government document outlining the request.”

Also last month, The Times reported that Trump ordered the biography under his recently-swapped Smithsonian portrait be revised, as the original mentioned that he had been “impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.” Trump subsequently fired Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet for “partisanship and bias,” then — while including no references to his impeachments in his official biography — included under President Bill Clinton’s biography that he was impeached "lying while under oath about a sexual relationship he had with a White House intern.”

Since Trump began his second term the Smithsonian seems to be engaging in anticipatory obedience, or the practice in which corporations preemptively give a dictator what they want to avoid trouble. In a January report in The Guardian, staff at the Smithsonian said their employers were being “overly cautious,” citing as one example how they were told to not refer to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II as “unjust” because that could seem “partisan.” On another occasion they were asked to replace the word “diversity” with “variety” on science exhibits in which the term was not being used in the political context that Trump supporters usually find objectionable.

“Very quickly, things that would not have been considered DEI began being considered DEI, which was almost anything not white,” said Steven Nelson, who recently stepped down from a senior position at the National Gallery of Art. A Smithsonian employee anonymously told The Guardian that the institution's philosophy to the White House "don’t poke at it."

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