The past may be carved in bronze, but the voice is unmistakably Trumpian

Photo: AP images

T

he Presidential Walk of Fame, which festoons the wall of the West Colonnade that runs along the northern flank of the Rose Garden, was supposed to offer a quiet stroll through history. Just some presidential portraits, dates, and neutral verbs. Sometime over the previous week, President Donald J. Trump decided to install a set of historical plaques with a built-in Trump annotation.

Take Grover Cleveland. The plaque begins normally enough: born in Caldwell, New Jersey; first Democrat elected after the Civil War; nonconsecutive terms. Then it takes a hard right turn into modern commentary lane. The plaque explains that while Cleveland pulled off nonconsecutive terms, Trump’s own nonconsecutive victories were done “more successfully,” with a “landslide second election,” winning all seven swing states, the popular vote, more counties than anyone, and overcoming what the plaque calls “crooked Fake Media” and “unbelievably skewed polls.”

By the end, the plaque stopped being about Grover Cleveland at all.

Elsewhere on the walk, the tone varies by president, but the narrator never changes.

Ronald Reagan gets the usual Greatest Hits: Cold War, optimism, conservative iconography; but tucked neatly into the plaque is a curious biographical detail. Reagan, we are informed, was “a fan of Donald J. Trump long before Trump ever ran for president.” Meanwhile, Bill Clinton’s plaque finds it necessary to highlight that his wife was defeated by Donald Trump in 2016.

Four presidents are afforded a rare double plaque, and two of them are named Trump. The other two are his two predecessors, Obama and Biden.

Barack Obama is framed not as a transitional figure or historic first, but as a “divisive political figure,” with his health care law rebranded on the plaque as the “highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act.” It’s less something you’d find in a Smithsonian and more likely to show up on a T-shirt at a campaign rally’s merch table.

And then there’s Joe Biden, whose frame replaces his portrait with an autopen image. Biden is referred to as both “Sleepy” and “Crooked,” and described as the product of “the most corrupt election in American history,” governed not by him but by unnamed forces to his left. This is not biography, it’s opposition research, engraved.

Most presidents leave behind speeches, doctrines, maybe a library. Trump left behind a comments section that you can’t scroll past, mute, or turn off. The past may be carved in bronze, but the voice is unmistakably Trumpian, speaking in absolutes, superlatives, and grievances that refuse to age.

Stefanik’s Exit Sends a Message

When Rep. Elise Stefanik exited the New York governor’s race, it was framed publicly as a mix of family priorities and political realism. The real story, however, runs through Donald Trump’s choice to pull her nomination for US ambassador to the United Nations nine months ago, and the chain reaction that followed.

Trump reversed course on Stefanik’s ambassadorship, not based on ideology or temperament, but based on arithmetic. With a razor-thin congressional margin, Trump decided he couldn’t afford to lose a safe Republican seat. And so Stefanik stayed in Congress. Not because she suddenly mattered more there, but because the numbers did.

Well, that decision mattered more than it appeared at the time. It sent a subtle but unmistakable message that Stefanik’s career trajectory was now subordinate to Trump’s immediate legislative needs. The off-ramp vanished, and with it, the assumption that she was being actively advanced rather than strategically parked.

From there, everything else snapped into focus. A run for governor even with a Trump endorsement is difficult enough, given how unforgiving New York’s landscape is for Republican candidates. And when it became clear to Stefanik that she couldn’t even count on that endorsement, she didn’t just drop out of the gubernatorial race, she announced she would not seek reelection to Congress at all.

That detail matters. It transforms the exit from a retreat into a message. If Trump’s decision was about preserving a House majority, Stefanik’s response was to remove herself from the equation entirely. You don’t want to lose my seat? Fine. You won’t get to keep it through me, though.

This was leverage, exercised quietly. Stefanik had played the loyal soldier for years. When the promised promotion was rescinded for tactical reasons, she chose not to remain a pawn. Walking away from Congress ensured that Trump’s short-term math conundrum became someone else’s long-term headache.

Stefanik’s exit wasn’t driven by a single slight or a single race; it was the result of a reordered hierarchy, in which loyalty no longer guaranteed elevation and ambition was put on hold indefinitely. Trump made a decision to protect his majority, and Stefanik made a decision to protect her autonomy. And in the quiet space between those two choices, an entire political future changed direction.

Lemmer on the Map

The White House Map Room is not a sentimental place. It was built for urgency; for maps spread out flat, decisions made quickly, and the weight of the world pressing down on a table. During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt used the Map Room to track troop movements across Europe, pins and arrows inching forward while the fate of European Jewry was being sealed an ocean away.

This week, the room served a different purpose.

Last week, before performing at the White House Chanukah Party, Shulem Lemmer was escorted to his green room, the quiet space meant for a performer to pause, focus, and prepare. That green room happened to be the Map Room. And in that space, dense with power and memory, Lemmer pulled out a Gemara and learned the day’s daf.

In 1943, as the Holocaust raged, hundreds of Orthodox rabbis came to Washington seeking an audience with Roosevelt. They were turned away. Jewish voices stayed outside while maps were studied inside.

This time, there was no barrier. A Jew sat within the walls, studying Torah in the very room where those pleas once ended; and a Jewish voice went out from there, past the walls that once held it back.

Then Lemmer stepped up to the stage and sang “Hashem Bentsh America” in Yiddish.

The Map Room that once counted progress in miles and divisions now quietly testified how far a people can come and still remain who they are.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1092)