Nancy Mace celebrated Presidents Day by tweeting an image of a painting featuring President Donald Trump at a table with a group of former Republican commanders in chief, including two of the party’s most hated and disreputable figures.
In addition to placing Trump in the company of national heroes Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and conservative icon Ronald Reagan, the painting seats him with Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, the latter of whom Trump himself blasted for having “a failed and uninspiring presidency.”
“Today, we celebrate the past and present Presidents whose leadership has helped shape America into the greatest country in the world,” Mace wrote. “God bless America.”
Seated immediately to Trump’s left in the painting is Nixon, whose White House carried out a array of illegal, clandestine stings in the early 1970s, including bugging the offices of his political foes.
Nixon famously declared he was “not a crook” in 1973 but only warded off impeachment by resigning, and evaded criminal prosecution when his successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him. (Ford is depicted standing behind Trump in the painting, smiling with his arms crossed.)
Trump and Nixon would likely have lots to talk about: The president told Fox & Friends during his first term in 2020 that he “learned a lot from Richard Nixon: don’t fire people.”
Trump was alluding to Nixon’s strategic error in turfing out several aides who would go on to provide evidence against him.
How Trump applied those lessons is unclear, as his first term was marked by several prominent dismissals. A 2021 Brookings Institution analysis found the turnover in senior-level positions during his first term was the highest of any president in the previous four decades.
Trump’s 2017 sacking of then-FBI director James Comey, who oversaw the bureau’s investigations into allegations of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian influence during the 2016 presidential election, was arguably the most infamous of his personnel moves.
In addition to Nixon, the painting Mace tweeted seated Trump across from a smiling George W. Bush, who is routinely ranked by historians as among the worst modern presidents and who leading human rights organizations have deemed a war criminal.
Trump himself is no fan of Bush, whose laundry list of catastrophes includes the Iraq War, which was mounted on faulty intelligence, and the 2008 subprime crisis. (Trump, a teetotaler, and Bush, who denies he was an alcoholic but confessed to “drinking too much” before he went sober, are not depicted with alcoholic beverages).
“Why was he willing to spend trillions of dollars and be responsible for the death of perhaps millions of people?” Trump said of his Republican predecessor in a 2021 statement. “He shouldn’t be lecturing us about anything. The World Trade Center came down during his watch. Bush led a failed and uninspiring presidency.”
The Trump administration’s contempt for the Bush presidency even extends down to Number One Observatory Circle.
Vice President JD Vance blasted Bush’s VP, Dick Cheney, as “legitimately the worst vice president of my lifetime” in an interview with comedian Tim Dillon last year, adding that he thought Cheney was “effective at destroying the country.”
The artist who placed Trump in the company of his revered and despised Republican forebears is oil painter Andy Thomas, whose work is non-partisan.
Thomas has also painted painted a near-identical scene of past Democratic presidents cheerfully gathered around a table, which includes Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy, and Franklin Roosevelt.
In a 2020 video, he explained that he makes a new painting to update the Democrat or Republican scenario every time a new president is elected.
Thomas also emphasized that he is a fan of presidents Republican and Democrat: “I try to put them into an environment that is a feel-good environment. I do a lot of research on these men and I’ve come to like, personally, every one of them.”
