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President Biden’s personal touches in the Oval Office include replacing a portrait of Andrew Jackson and adding a bust of work icon Cesar Chavez behind the Resolute desk, according to the Washington Post.
The new layout includes busts of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy on either side of the fireplace as well as the bust of Chavez. Other busts in the office include Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt.
A portrait of Jackson, the seventh president, has been removed and replaced with a portrait of Benjamin Franklin. Trump has frequently identified with Jackson, who was elected president on a populist platform and denounced entrenched interests, while critics have pointed to his brutal policies against Indigenous peoples and participation in the slave trade.
Emphasizing Biden’s emphasis on national unity, the paintings of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, fierce rivals in life, are in close proximity to each other as part of the redecoration. They are intended “to show how differences of opinion, expressed in the Republic’s guardrails, are essential to democracy,” Biden’s office told the Post.
Directly across from the Resolute Desk is a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt, who, like Biden, took office amid multiple crises, including the Great Depression and the growing clouds of WWII in Europe.
Such an overhaul is standard procedure for a new administration, but Biden’s Oval Office contains more depictions of historical figures than average, according to the newspaper.
“It was important for President Biden to step into an oval that looked like America and that began to show the landscape of who he was to become as president,” said Ashley Williams, deputy director of Oval Office operations , the newspaper.
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