President Donald Trump couldn’t help but favorably compare himself to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in a rambling speech in the Rose Garden on Tuesday.
“Hey, they didn’t put out eight wars, nine coming,” he said. “We put out eight wars, and the ninth is coming, believe it or not.”
The moment came when Trump began to brag about his tacky “Walk of Fame” addition to the White House Rose Garden, which features portraits of most of the presidents (Joe Biden’s “portrait” is a photo of an autopen). He noted the line of presidents goes from George Washington to himself, but sadly conceded that even he would have to rank himself behind Washington.
Trump then recalled a person “on television” who said he was the “third best president” behind Washington and Lincoln.
“I got extremely angry at this man,” Trump, 79, admitted.
It’s unclear who the “person on television” Trump was referring to with this story is. In February, he said in an interview with Fox’s Bret Baier that someone told him a Washington/Lincoln ticket couldn’t beat him in an election.
After bringing up his mysterious television offender, Trump tried to get Sen. John Thune’s attention in the crowd.
“It’s gonna be, it’s gonna be tough to beat—Mr. Senator—it’s gonna be—John—it’s gonna be tough to beat Washington and Lincoln, but we’re gonna give it a try.“
Trump then dropped his favorite boast about “ending eight wars” to dangle over the ghosts of Lincoln and Washington.
Trump is consistently ranked near the bottom of presidential rankings. C-SPAN’s 2021 poll of historians found Trump ranking fourth-worst (beating out Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan) while Lincoln and Washington ranked first and second, respectively. A 2024 poll of executives from the American Political Science Association ranked Trump worst.
Furthermore, Trump’s oft-repeated boast of having “ended eight wars” has been widely fact-checked and found to be an embellishment at best.
Trump says he has ended wars with economic pressure, but several wars he claims to have ended, such as the DRC and Rwanda conflict and the Israel/Hamas conflict, still erupt in violence. Other “wars,” such as Serbia/Kosovo and Egypt/Ethiopa, were never wars in the first place.
Trump’s Rose Garden speech was intended to celebrate the demolition of The White House East Wing to make room for his massive, $200 million ballroom before devolving into embellishments about his accomplishments and attacks on his enemies.
In one notable digression, he chided Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for facing criticism from “AOC plus 3″—his nickname for the progressive congressional Democrats known as “The Squad”—before repeating a story about asking the president of Sudan to take Rep. Ilhan Omar “back.”
