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April 12, 2025

The Democrats’ laughable foofaraw over Obama’s relocated portrait

By Andrea Widburg

News broke today that the Trump White House had removed a portrait of Barack Obama and replaced it with that awesome photograph showing Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, bloodied but unbowed, shaking his fist in the air, and shouting, “Fight, fight, fight!” It is one of the most iconic photos in presidential history and surely deserving of a prominent place in the Trump White House:

Up until the moment this photo went up, that prominent place was occupied by a picture of Barack Obama. When Democrats heard that Obama’s portrait had been displaced, the weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and tearing of garments was a sight to behold. How dare Trump, the president, hang a picture of himself, and not of another president who, incidentally, tried to destroy him through the Russia Hoax? Many of the complaints included claims that the shooting in Butler was a fake, never mind that the shooter killed one and wounded two before being killed himself: It took a message from White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung to clarify that Obama’s portrait wasn’t now languishing in the back of a closet but was, instead, just a few feet away, still hanging on a White House wall:

It’s easy and fun to laugh at the hysteria, but I had the uncomfortable feeling that we conservatives would have done just the same (only, I hope, less obscenely and with less rampant stupidity on display). The internet and social media have created a knee-jerk, reactive form of politics that creates more and more division as people react first and, occasionally, think later.

I’m reminded of what happened with the practice of law as technology improved. In the old days, lawyers wrote letters to each other, so it could be a day or more (sometimes much more) before hearing back from opposing counsel. These delays, which saw lawyers work on other projects and think things over, kept tempers cool.

When I came along, fax machines were a thing, but they were expensive. (We’d charge clients $1 per page for sending a fax.) Although we used faxes sparingly, it was a fairly instant form of communication. The only real slowdown upon receiving a letter from opposing counsel was the time it took to dictate your response, have your secretary type it up, and then review and sign it. Cases got more vicious.

By the time I left the practice of law, lawyers were fighting via email, typing out ill-thought-out letters to each other over the course of minutes. Law firms made a lot of money thanks to this rapidly escalating, inflamed litigation because lawyers never had a chance to step back and calm down. The clients, of course, paid the price.

In the same way, the speed of social media today, which is not matched by the speed of thought and wisdom, is causing America to pay a price as our divisions deepen at the speed with which data flows across the internet.

Image by Pixlr AI.

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