CT Blue

This is perplexing, to say the least:

Almost eight months after Donald Trump was inaugurated, photos of the 45th president of the United States still do not appear in thousands of federal buildings — a delay that is especially odd, given Trump’s fondness for his own image.

In a tradition dating back to the Civil War, Trump’s picture should be greeting employees and visitors to United States embassies, ports of entry and federal courthouses, just as official portraits of predecessor Barack Obama were on display by his third month in office and of Bill Clinton by June of his first year. Yet, in thousands of buildings, Trump’s face is a notable absence, according to a story in The Washington Post on Monday,

There has arguably never been a president so eager to promote his own image as Trump, the country’s first reality-television-star commander in chief. Indeed, last month, former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele described the tweet-loving president as “obsessed with his own self-image.” Trump even hung a fake magazine cover of himself at one of his golf clubs.

So that only makes it tougher to understand why, 235 days after being sworn in, Trump has yet to sit for his official photograph. Once taken, it is the responsibility of the Government Publishing Office to distribute the photo to the more than 7,000 federal installations across the world.

…

More than 130,000 official photographs of Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were printed when the Democrat took office in 2009. Federal regulations mandated that all of them be removed and recycled or shredded the moment Trump was sworn in.

I spend a lot of time in waiting rooms at the Social Security Disability hearing offices, and remember how much I disliked having both Bush and Cheney staring down at me as I sat there. Particularly Cheney, he of the sneering lip, who seemed to be taking a smug pleasure in my dissatisfaction. I was in the waiting room the day and the moment the Orange One was installed, and the security guard, as the last quoted paragraph says, told me he was under strict orders to remove Obama at the stroke of noon, which he in fact did.

I assumed it was only a matter of time before you know who would be staring down from those walls, but he has not appeared, and, truth to tell, I suspected it was a bit of subversive activity on the part of the staff there, though for reasons I won’t go into, that always seemed unlikely.

Now I learn it’s just one more example of Trumpian incompetence, but one for which we can all, including me in particular, be thankful. I’ll be retiring in seven months, and it is, perhaps, possible, that I won’t have to look at that face as I sit and wait for another ALJ to dispense injustice to one of my clients. In these trying times, we must be thankful for little things.