Donald Trump is breaking a 40-year tradition after announcing that he won’t be unveiling former President Barack Obama’s portrait at the White House, according to NBC News.
It has been a decades-long tradition for first-term presidents to hold ceremonies in the East Room to unveil the portraits of their immediate predecessors. Obama did this for former President George W. Bush in 2012.
“George, you went out of your way to make sure that the transition to a new administration was as seamless as possible,” Obama said at the time.
While Obama showed respect to his predecessor, Trump has constantly attacked Obama and blaming him for the current failures at the White House.
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Trump has been attacking Obama since he first became president, spreading the false narrative that he wasn’t born in the United States.
Despite their rocky past, Obama wrote Trump an Inauguration Day letter in 2017 and left it in the desk drawer in the Oval Office; Trump said it was “beautiful.”
After being berated constantly by Trump, Obama finally spoke out while speaking to 2020 graduates of historically black colleges and universities over the weekend. He did not mention Trump by name
“More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” Obama said the virtual commencement address. “A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”
Though Obama did not mention Trump, the former president’s comments were widely interpreted as a direct jab at his successor.
