Donald Trump’s plaques for past presidents include falsehoods

In a break from tradition, President Donald Trump decorated a White House walkway with bronze plaques for each U.S. president. In an even sharper break with tradition, the plaques were written in a style echoing Trump’s Truth Social posts, with misleading or false descriptions of recent Democratic presidents.

Former President Joe Biden, who Trump calls “Sleepy Joe,” is represented not by a portrait but by a photograph of an autopen, the use of which Trump has falsely said invalidates Biden’s pardons. 

Biden’s plaque says he took office “as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States.” That’s false. Trump and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits contesting the 2020 election results; they lost more than 60. And a group of Republicans, including former federal judges, examined Trump’s statements about fraud and miscounting and found they didn’t present evidence that would invalidate the election results. 

The plaque also says Biden oversaw the “highest Inflation ever recorded.” While inflation was the highest in four decades under Biden, the highest ever occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Former President Barack Obama’s plaque calls him “one of the most divisive political figures in American History,” even though his retrospective favorability rating in 2025 is the highest of any of the past five presidents, at 59% favorable, according to Gallup. Trump’s favorable rating in the same poll was 48%.

Obama’s plaque said his Affordable Care Act — which made it easier to obtain health insurance when employers don’t offer it — was “highly ineffective.” The percentage of uninsured Americans dropped from 14.8% in 2012, before the law was fully implemented, to 8.6% in 2016, Obama’s final year in office.

Obama’s plaque says he “spied on the 2016 Presidential Campaign of Donald J. Trump,” but multiple independent investigations, including bipartisan Senate reports, found no political influence over the FBI investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.