Claim:
The White House of U.S. President Donald Trump added commentary plaques beneath portraits in the “Presidential Walk of Fame” that referred derisively to past Democratic presidents.
Rating:
In mid-December 2025, a claim (archived) circulated online that U.S. President Donald Trump’s Republican White House added commentary plaques beneath portraits of former presidents in the “Presidential Walk of Fame” that referred derisively to past Democratic presidents.
According to some claims, the plaques reportedly called former U.S. President Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe Biden” and “by far the worst President in American History.” Former U.S. President Barack Obama also did not escape the writer’s ire as plaques called him “one of the most divisive political figures in American History” and accused him of spying on Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign.
One X user who posted photos of the alleged plaques wrote, “The White House has added text to the Wall of Fame next to the Rose Garden,” and added a skull emoji.
The White House has added text to the Wall of Fame next to the Rose Garden. 💀 @PenguinSix pic.twitter.com/3mVNI21LDo
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) December 17, 2025
The claim also circulated on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived), Bluesky (archived) and Reddit (archived). Snopes readers wrote in, asking if the plaques and their commentary on former presidents were real.
According to reputable reports in outlets like Reuters, The Associated Press and Getty Images that included photographs of the plaques, the new additions to Trump’s “Presidential Hall of Fame” were real. Therefore, we rate this claim as true.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reportedly told (archived) CNN’s White House Reporter Alayna Treene, “The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each President and the legacy they left behind. As a student of history, many were written directly by the President himself.”
The White House press office confirmed Leavitt’s reported quote but did not reply to a question about which specific plaques Trump wrote.
According to a photo from The Associated Press, Trump “conceived, built, and dedicated” the “Presidential Walk of Fame” in the White House on Nov. 5, 2025. It was unclear exactly what date the White House added the plaques in question.
Photographs of the new additions to the “Presidential Walk of Fame” showed that the plaques often appeared to veer into commentary rather than merely recounting history.
The plaque beneath the portrait of Biden — which Trump previously replaced with a picture of an autopen in a nod to an oft-touted claim that some documents Biden signed were void because he used an autopen — began:
Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History. Taking office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States, Biden oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our Nation to the brink of destruction.
The plaque continued to criticize Biden’s economic, energy, immigration and foreign policies and appeared to pin both Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Hamas’ attack on Israel in 2023 on Biden’s “devastating weakness.”
A second plaque began:
Nicknamed both “Sleepy” and “Crooked,” Joe Biden was dominated by his Radical Left handlers. They and their allies in the Fake News Media attempted to cover up his severe mental decline, and his unprecedented use of the Autopen.
A Snopes investigation found that U.S. presidents have used autopens since Thomas Jefferson and that the practice is fully legal, according to various U.S. government memos.
The second plaque concluded, “But despite it all, President Trump would get Re-Elected in a Landslide, and SAVE AMERICA!”
Other former presidents including Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton also did not escape criticism.
Two plaques about Obama named him as “one of the most divisive political figures in American History,” criticized the Affordable Care Act, a “stagnant” economy and “the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal” and accused Obama of spying on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. According to one plaque, Obama “presided over the creation of the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, the worst political scandal in American History.”
Bush, a Republican, faced somewhat milder criticism, as his plaque merely commented that Bush “started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which should not have happened.”
Clinton’s plaque, after a quick summation of the former Democratic president’s actions including “NAFTA, which President Donald J. Trump would later terminate as being bad for the United States,” concluded, “In 2016, President Clinton’s wife, Hillary, lost the Presidency to President Donald J. Trump!”
The “Presidential Walk of Fame” also included plaques about both of Trump’s presidencies. Under his most recent portrait, two plaques praised the president’s achievements in:
… ending eight wars in his first eight months, securing the Border, deporting gang members and migrant criminals, making our Cities safe, helping our Farmers, defeating Inflation, reducing Energy costs, and drawing Trillions of Dollars in new Investment, a RECORD, into the United States.
Snopes has previously investigated the role Trump has played in ending various international conflicts and found that while the United States did play a part in brokering a form of a ceasefire in some cases, in most instances Trump did not permanently end the conflicts in question.
The plaques describing Trump’s second term also included a claim that Trump “built” a ballroom at the White House. At the time of this writing, the planned ballroom, which led to the demolition of the White House’s East Wing, had not yet been constructed.
Regardless, Trump’s second-term plaque promised, in all caps, “THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”
