The White House tradition in which the sitting president unveils the previous president’s portrait may not happen for the first time in decades.
Sources familiar with the matter told NBC News that the East Room ceremony won’t happen this year amid a feud between President Trump and former President Barack Obama. The insiders said the event may not happen until 2025 if Trump wins a second term in November.
“Obama, for his part, has no interest in participating in the post-presidency rite of passage so long as Trump is in office,” the outlet reported Tuesday.
Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said the dilemma may be the first of its kind.
“You’ve got a president who’s talking about putting the previous one in legal jeopardy, to put it nicely. We have not seen a situation like that in history,” he said. “It takes antipathy of a new president for a predecessor to a new level.”
Trump and Obama traded barbs recently. The former president delivered virtual commencement speeches on Saturday to graduates at historically black colleges and universities, during which he slammed his successor’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy, that’s how little kids think. Unfortunately, a lot of so-called grown-ups, including some with fancy titles and important jobs, still think that way, which is why things are so screwed up,” he said.
The former president also said, “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. A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”
Trump hit back at Obama outside the White House on Sunday, saying, “Look. He was an incompetent president. That’s all I can say. Grossly incompetent.”
He repeated the comments on Monday, further calling Obama an “incompetent president.”
“He left a broken military. ISIS was all over the place, and I got rid of it. I knocked out 100% of the caliphate, and when I came in, it was a mess,” Trump said during a session with reporters at the White House. “We had a broken military. We had a depleted military. We had little on the shelves if you talk about pandemics.”
Typically, White House portraits begin their creation process toward the end of a president’s term and are completed within a couple of years. The Obamas reportedly selected an artist in 2017, but the process stalled. Their official White House portraits are different from their presidential portraits, which were revealed in 2018 and hang in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
The history of the tradition dates back to 1980, with President Jimmy Carter inviting former President Gerald Ford. Before that, there were informal unveilings hosted by first lady Lady Bird Johnson.
“It’s a statement of generosity on [the part of] the current president and first lady,” former White House curator Betty Monkman said in 2017. “And it’s a very warm, lovely moment.”
