Shock! Horror! Hold the presses! Trump has actually done something right!
Obama removed the bust of Winston Churchill from the White House, sending it back to the British Embassy. This was NOT well received over here (and remember that Chruchill was an honorary American citizen, and his mother was American). Trump is putting it back.
I do not think removing MLK from the Oval Office on Day One can be classified as “doing something right.” IMHO it was a dumb move handled in a clumsy way by what promises to be a clumsy, no-class administration.
(Bolding mine)
Really? To what degree though? I don’t remember this being reported or commented upon in the UK at the time, and I’m having trouble finding any major contemporary reportage of that incident via Google (although of course I’m willing to accept that’s a failure on my part.)
Google is failing me too, but I’m British and I remember it well enough at the time.
First, let’s get the facts straight. He moved the bust to another part of the White House, to make room for a Martin Luther King bust.
A factual explanation: The president explained that the bust is placed outside his private office in the White House residence, known as the Treaty Room, where he sees it "every day, including on weekends, when I’m going into that office to watch a basketball game.” It was long rumored that Obama had sent the bust back to the British Embassy after removing it from the Oval Office.
He went on to explain that “as the first African-American president” he thought it appropriate to put a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Oval Office, noting that there are “only so many tables where you can put busts, otherwise it starts looking a little cluttered.”
This is also incorrect: “Trump said the reporter, Zeke Miller, couldn’t see the bust because a camera man was standing in front of it and immediately assumed it had been removed.” (Miller later apologized)
Well in that case I’m going to file it under “barely noticed storm in a teeny tiny teacup”.
I’m an American, and I remember very well that a lot of British commentators were outraged by it.
“Telling Americans what to do” seems to be the entire reason for British commentators’ existence.
Thanks for clearing that up.
That colonial mindset dies hard when they see their unearned power slipping further and further from their grasp and they have to shore up their own economy by their own means - no serfs or slaves or criminals to work for a pittance. No wonder they’re so pissed at people coming to work on their soil, only *they *get to profit off doing that to other countries!
Fact check: The White House curator’s office did return a bust of Churchill to the British government, but it was not the original bust on display in the White House. There were two busts. The idea that it was a snub to the British is a complete urban legend.
It looks like you were taken in, Quartz.
Your concern about what foreign commentators think, even about untrue things, is to be commended.
No, you remember the right-wing media industrial complex telling you that the Brits were outraged.
What you don’t remember is that nothing of the sort actually happened, and that it was a made-up story.
If Churchill is involved, I believe it qualifies as an urbane legend.
While I recognize Churchill’s historical significance, exactly why should his bust be in the Oval Office in preference to any other possible choices?
Is there a bust of FDR on display at 10 Downing Street?
I’m startin’ to think you don’t care for Trump much, do ya?
Sad.
Whether or not British officials cared all that much, the British press had a field day with it.
Although it turns out that Churchill got replaced with Abraham Lincoln, not MLK.
“The bronze by Sir Jacob Epstein, worth hundreds of thousands of pounds if it were ever sold on the open market, enjoyed pride of place in the Oval Office during President Bush’s tenure.
But when British officials offered to let Mr Obama to hang onto the bust for a further four years, the White House said: “Thanks, but no thanks.”…
American politicians have made quoting Churchill, whose mother was American, something of an art form, but not Mr Obama, who prefers to cite the words and works of his hero Abraham Lincoln. Indeed a bust of Mr Lincoln now sits in the Oval Office where Epstein’s Churchill once ruled the roost…
Churchill has less happy connotations for Mr Obama than those American politicians who celebrate his wartime leadership. It was during Churchill’s second premiership that Britain suppressed Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion. Among Kenyans allegedly tortured by the colonial regime included one Hussein Onyango Obama, the President’s grandfather.
The rejection of the bust has left some British officials nervously reading the runes to see how much influence the UK can wield with the new regime in Washington.”
Nice to see that during the final days of their tenure, Barack and Michelle apparently didn’t load up moving vans full of White House furniture and artifacts for their personal use.
Yes, but that was the second bust, which was loaned to George W. Bush in 2001, not the original one, which has been in the White House since the 1960s.