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Notes for the National Portrait Gallery
The verdict that matters most is history’s.
In March of 2019, a year before the pandemic, my wife and I took our eight-year-old daughter to DC for her spring break. We hit the usual tourist spots — the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Air and Space Museum, and also the National Portrait Gallery, where I don’t think I’d ever been before. At the time, the exhibit of presidential portraits was pretty mobbed, as the Obamas’ portraits — by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald — were fairly new then, and appropriately stunning.
But as I walked into the gallery, I was seized by a terrible thought:
Someday, Donald Trump’s portrait would be here, too.
It seemed unfair, and galling, that this criminal bastard would be in the company of Washington, Jefferson, FDR, Eisenhower, and — yeah — Barack. For that matter, it was galling that he would even be in the company of Franklin Pierce, Chester Arthur, or Millard Fillmore. He just seemed so….unworthy (and some of those guys were slaveholders). Perhaps irrationally, this had long been one of my greatest pet peeves regarding Donald: that he was not only so ghastly, but so unsubstantial.
I mean, we can’t deny that he was president, or put a Roger Maris-like asterisk by his name indicating that the Kremlin helped put him in power. (Can…
