As the main office of the President of the United States, the furnishings of the Oval Office of the White House often have the personal style of different presidents. Each president will change the decoration and furnishings of the office when he takes office.
“It’s important for President Biden to walk into an ‘America-like’ Oval Office and start showing what kind of person he’s going to be as president.” Ashley Williams, deputy director of the Oval Office, said in an interview with The Washington Post.
What changes in the furnishings of the Oval Office after welcoming its new owner Biden on January 20th.
What is the meaning of the new statue?
According to a BBC report on the 21st, the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States, in the Oval Office, is gone forever after Biden took office.
Jackson is also regarded as a populist, and Trump has publicly praised Jackson highly.
Jackson’s portrait is located on the left side of the presidential desk and has been replaced by a portrait of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was not only one of the founding fathers of the United States, but also a famous writer, scientist and philosopher.
The Washington Post said that the portrait of Franklin was intended to show Biden’s commitment to science in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Franklin’s portrait also has a moon rock, which expresses the same meaning.
On both sides of the fireplace opposite the desk are busts of Martin Luther King, the leader of the American civil rights movement, and former Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
Biden is said to have frequently mentioned the influence of the two on the black civil rights movement.
Also in the office is a bust of Rosa Parks, a black woman known as the “mother of the civil rights movement”. In 1955, Parks refused to give up his seat to white people on the bus, and a series of subsequent events were believed to have begun the civil rights movement.
Above the fireplace hangs a huge portrait of Franklin Roosevelt, a Democratic president who led the United States through the Great Depression and World War II.
Other portraits include several founding fathers of the United States: George Washington, the first president, Thomas Jefferson, the third president, and Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury.
The portraits of Jefferson and Hamilton are paired together, in the words of Biden office officials, to express “the importance of dissent to democracy within the guardrails of the republican system”. Also placed is a portrait of former President Abraham Lincoln.
The portraits of Roosevelt, Jefferson and Hamilton are reportedly newly added.
On the table behind Biden is not only family photos, but also a bust of Mexican-American labor leader César Chávez, who fought for farm workers’ rights in the 1960s and 1970s.
CNN reported on the 21st that the bust of Chávez entered the presidential office on the same day as Biden proposed immigration law reform, which aims to provide a path for nearly 11 million immigrants living in the United States but have no legal status to become American citizens in eight years.
Drinks, pens and chairs have been changed.
The Oval Office’s presidential desk is the Resolue Desk, which Biden chose out of six presidential desks. This desk was given to the U.S. government by the British government in 1880. The wood used was from the British navy’s three-masted rescue ship “Fortitude”.
This table is also used by Trump’s presidency, but the two new groups of items on the table clearly reflect the fact that the president has been replaced: a set of tea cups and saucers, and a box of pens that sign orders.
Trump likes to drink Diet Coke. It is reported that he had a button in the Oval Office to ask others to get him a Coke. Few people have pictures of him having a teacup or coffee cup beside him.
CNN said that Trump has long liked to sign official government documents with a thick black marker, as if it were the signature style of a star.
Biden sat in a dark brown leather chair when the executive order was signed on the day of his inauguration on January 20, and when someone last caught Trump in the Oval Office, there were thick reddish-brown executive seats in the office.
This is very similar to, even identical, the seats Trump used in his private office before taking office.
Trump brought gold curtains and carpets when he took office in early 2017, but these things left with his master on January 20. Back to the office were dark blue carpets and dark gold curtains when Clinton was president.
The United States flag and the presidential flag also replaced the flags of different branches of the army.
Churchill disappeared, Johnson responded in a low-key way
After Biden came to power, the bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was also missing. Churchill was originally loaned to George W. Bush by the British government, and Obama took office and removed him.
Boris Johnson, then mayor of London and current British Prime Minister, accused Obama of saying that “the president of Kenyan descent has ancestral aversion to the British Empire”.
After Trump took office, he moved the statue of Churchill back. It was not until this time that the Democrats returned to the White House that Churchill was invited out of the White House.
Johnson’s attitude towards the removal of Churchill this time is very different from last time.
“The Oval Office is the private office of the president (of the United States) and only needs to be decorated by the president as he wishes,” a spokesman for Johnson said.
