After taking over the White House, Joe Biden was quick to redecorate the Oval Office to his likings.
Among other changes, Biden has removed the bust of Winston Churchill, which Trump reinstated back in 2016 after replacing Obama, and replaced it with the busts of civil rights activists including Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr, Robert F. Kennedy, and Rosa Parks.
While every US president has the right to decorate the Oval Office as they wish, Biden’s decision to ditch the bust of the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was met with resistance across the pond.
As Trump’s ally and the Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage warned, the removal of Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office signifies that Biden won’t be a great friend of the UK.
“If that is confirmed it won’t surprise me at all because Joe Biden is anti-Brexit. Joe Biden is pro-the European Union. Joe Biden is pro-the Irish nationalist cause,” Farage said in an interview with BBC.
“And Joe Biden was the vice president when Obama came here in 2016, looked down his nose at us and said if we dared to vote for independence we would go to the back of the queue. So don’t expect Biden to be a great friend of this country, he won’t be.”
Farage also appeared to praise Trump for reinstating the bust of Churchill back in 2016, years after the same bust was removed from the office by Barack Obama.
“I spoke to Trump three days after the election in 2016 and I asked him will you put the Churchill bust back in the Oval Office as a symbol of how he felt about the United Kingdom, how he felt about the things that over the last hundred years have done together and he put it back there the first day,” he recalled.
Meanwhile, the Churchill bust’s removal from the Oval Office also sparked concerns among the Tories, members of the Conservative party.
“It appears to be a Democrat thing. I hope he doesn’t also take after President Obama in other respects, otherwise we are going to the back of the queue [a reference to trade deals],” Andrew Bridgen, a Tory MP, said.
“He wants to show that he is completely different to Trump but I hope when it comes to the US relationship with the UK it will be the same as with Trump.”
Besides getting rid of the bust of Winston Churchill and introducing the faces of civil rights activists in the Oval Office, Biden has also decorated the room with a series of family photos.
He also decided to ditch Trump’s infamous diet coke button which allowed the former president to get a fresh dose of coke at any time simply by pressing the button.
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Replaced!