…Or that any previous holder of his position would have ever dreamed of displaying to any previous President.
The White House, you see, asked the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home to turn over the Sword of Honor given to Ike in 1947 by the city of London for his role as Allied Supreme Commander during World War II, so President Trump could now give it to King Charles last month during the President Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom. The gift would symbolize the continuing bond between the two nations that was most powerfully forged during that war, but never mind: Todd Arrington, a career historian who was director of the museum, refused to allow the President to use the sword as a weapon of diplomacy, insisting that it had been donated to the institution and “belonged to the American people.”
Oh. Well, anything the government uses for any purpose “belongs to the American people.” Trump was reduced to giving the King a replica of the sword, and was, justifiably, ticked off. Arrington was told he could resign or be fired. He resigned.
If anyone thinks there is one chance in a million that this historian and long-time Deep State swamp creature with the National Park Service and National Archives and Records Administration would have similarly obstructed, say, President Obama’s request for an artifact to use in a high profile meeting with a foreign head of state, I have a cool bridge to sell them. Arrington exemplifies the way this President and his administration are sabotaged, undermined and interfered with in thousands of small (and often large) ways every day, all through the government and its agencies.
My Trump Deranged friends mock this President’s insistence on loyalty at all levels of government, yet considering what he experineced in his first term and is still experiencing, he would be negligent not to respond as he has. Most of the federal workers who are inclined to make it more difficult for the President their fellow citizens elected to do the job they elected him to do don’t get a chance to show their metaphorical true colors to the world, but when when one of them does, Trump is absolutely correct to make certain he or she doesn’t get a second chance.
Ethics Alarms 
I have a question. Absent the bias against Trump, should the Sword of Honor be given to Charles? We know the Left would dismiss the sword as unimportant anyway under normal circumstances, but had Barack Obama wanted to give it away, would it be right for the Eisenhower Museum to hand it over?
I think so. Ike would have said, “Sure! Anything that helps!” They gave the King a replica: if the musem had a replica and a card that said the original was given to King Charles by President Trump, what would be the down side?
I suppose some critics might argue that giving a sword back that was given to us might seem ungrateful or that giving the sword to a monarch is ironic in all the wrong ways, but those are probably petty arguments. It could be that the Eisenhower museum would want to keep the actual relic to attract tourists who want to see the actual items and not replicas (so many of the places we visit use replicas that Mr. Golden and I have developed a running gag about it).
Like King Charles’ Crown Jewels, mayhap?
Something like that. 🙂 It’s just nice to be able to see items actually belonging to or used by the historic person, especially some of their honors. The Eisenhower Museum may want to be able to show as much of The Actual as possible to draw more tourists.
I’ve seen the place. It’s in the middle of nowhere, but the statue of Ike in his SCAEF uniform (Eisenhower jacket and all) is impressive and the chapel with the tombs for him, Mamie and even little “Ikey” is very moving.
This appears to be grasping at straws to add one more piece of evidence in support of the concept of TDS.
Why would re-gifting something intended for General Eisenhower be considered a proper gift to a foreign head of state? Does not the U.S. possess anything of its own that would constitute a suitable gift? In 2009, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama gave Queen Elizabeth II a personalized iPod loaded with videos, photos, and Broadway show tunes. Wouldn’t a more appropriate gift from Trump have been an iPad loaded with videos of Trump speeches? Who would not want that?
Who in the Trump administration proposed the sword, and why? Someone in the protocol office of the State Department? Probably. It does not appear to have been Trump, nor even someone on the White House staff. Does saying no to a minion constitute an affront to Trump? Doubtful.
There can be no doubt that TDS exists, as does WDS and a number of other DSs. None need sketchy examples to prove their existence.
Gifts to heads of state run the gamut from historical artifacts to luxury items. I can find no example in history of a POTUS wanting to give a particular gift to a head of state and being turned down for any reason, never mind a lame one. Ike had lots of swords, and it was hardly a major item and its hardly a well-trafficked museum. The refusal was just a standard FU to Trump, and he shouldn’t have to put up with it. Your argument is contrived: Trump wanted to give the sword to the King, and the gesture makes sense. Which staffer made the request is irrelevant.
I have seen nothing indicating Trump personally wanted to regift the sword nor that he even was aware of the issue, nor that settling for a replica (or a West Point saber as some reports said) upset him. Maybe there was something on Truth Social, which I don’t read for the same reason I don’t pay attention to MSNBC (I’m already a dumb ass; why addle my brain even further?).
Those whose words and actions invite multiple FUs daily do not have to put up with them, if they are powerful enough, but, if they are intelligent enough, they should at least recognize the source of the problem. As hard as it would be to believe, perhaps Trump’s settling for a lesser trinket showed a smidgen of that awareness.
“As hard as it would be to believe, perhaps Trump’s settling for a lesser trinket showed a smidgen of that awareness.”
Perhaps, but I doubt it. Prior to someone on staff suggesting giving the sword to Charles – and it almost certainly was someone else because I doubt Trump even knew it existed – Trump tended not to settle for less than what he wanted. No change in that behavior.
He’s the president. Shouldn’t he, or his staff, be deferred to? Who runs the Executive Branch? The employees or the Executive? Quite frankly, the answer for too many is: the employees. Who knew half the country is enamored of being governed by unelected bureaurocrats?
In general, yes, the President should be deferred to. I’m making a devils advocate argument that, maybe, the director of the museum had a legitimate concern about handing over the sword so it could be given away to a foreign country (even our ally) instead of sitting in his museum where he may have felt it belonged.
Unfortunately, since we are in an era where so many people make professional decisions based on whether they will help or hinder President Trump (Just finished an otherwise excellent biography of Pat Nixon in which the author made sure to fill a paragraph on abortion with “reproductive rights” and “reproductive choices” and ponder what Pat would think today about Roe v Wade being overturned. Grrrrrr), it’s almost as if we must automatically default to the idea that Arrington did it on purpose to snub him. And maybe he did.
Or maybe not turning the sword over was doing the right thing, motivation behind the reasoning being right or not.
Shouldn’t his staff be deferred to? Well, so far as we can tell from the skimpy information we have, an unelected bureaucrat in the administration made a request and another unelected bureaucrat in the administration declined the request for what appears to be a valid reason.
Who runs the Executive Branch is an excellent question, now as it was during the previous administration. Obviously, it is the President, but that is the case only when the directions to subordinates are legal, clear, and consistent. Otherwise, unelected bureaucrats do what they believe is the right thing, or, in all too many cases, they do what they perceive the President wants, right or wrong.
Where we disagree is that I don’t think there was a valid reason to refuse the request. Strengthening US ties (which have been strained) with its traditional ally and one that largely shares our values is infinitely more important than a small part of the collection at a relatively limited and lightly trafficked museum. In fact, it’s a no-brainer, unless the decision-maker just wants to stick it to Trump.
Obviously, I don’t understand why a sword which had been presented to General Eisenhower, and, per the National Archives, belongs to the American people, is an appropriate gift for the King of England. Why not just gift him one of the original 13 colonies? Virginia, maybe. But, per The Times (of London), the actual gift was well received.
I guess this became a hot topic now, weeks after the ‘incident’, because the head of the Eisenhower library was forced out and some in the administration tied this at least partly to the issue of the sword. Were they concealing the real reason? Who knows?
The head of the library believed that the matter of the sword had been settled weeks ago when, apparently, a replica of Eisenhower’s West Point saber was agreed upon and then presented to the king during the visit. According to The NY Times, the request for the sword came from “giftgirl2025” (aka, apparently, Valley Girl) who initially told the museum that they were looking for “like a sword or something.”
If the actual Eisenhower sword was important at that time, I expect that the (acting) National Archivist, Marco Rubio, would have stepped in and made it happen. That he did not indicates the actual sword was not critical.
Back to the original point of the post – this does not at all seem to be a case of someone with TDS saying FU to Trump. It appears to be a made up story to justify getting rid of Arrington because he annoyed one of the petty dictators somewhere in the bureaucracy.
He can have New Jersey.
Nor should there be.
So I assumed that there were many such precedents of our president giving cool gifts from our many libraries and archives to foreign heads of state. Turns out–there’s none that I could find. Why? Because there’s actual a law. We’re all probably familiar with the law about presidents and all officials receiving gifts, but I wasn’t aware there was one about giving them. It’s capped at $2K in value, and there’s nothing in the law about, say, taking a piece of history and gifting it. And I couldn’t find a single example of that happening. So it looks to me like the leader of the Ike Library and Museum (which I once did research at, cool place) was legally in the right. As to whether the president, as head of the executive branch, should be able to do what he likes, I thought we resolved this in the Constitution. We are a nation of laws, where everyone’s power is checked by the law. The president can’t just assert executive power and get what he wants, even from the federal bureaucracy. So the original post made two assertions–no other president would be treated this way, and bravo to Trump for firing this TDS suffering jerk. I don’t think either of those assertions look factual at this point. Trump was wrong to fire a bureaucrat for upholding the law. Not for the first time, and unlikely to be the last, if trends continue.
Turns out there is no LAW, but executive ethics policies. “The Federal Management Regulation (FMR) and policies issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Office of Government Ethics (OGE) provide guidance on gift-giving by government officials.
In particular, the OGE’s Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch (5 C.F.R. Part 2635) discuss limits and guidelines related to gifts, including the value limits for gifts to foreign officials. The common figure of around $1,000 to $2,000 often cited comes from these guidelines, which recommend that gifts to foreign officials be modest and within a certain value to avoid improper influence.” So it’s an ethics guideline that gifts should be modest in value, as well as the fact that we don’t have a precedent of presidents or Secretaries of State ripping out a piece of history and saying “here ya go!” There’s probably a regulation or law about giving away government property, too.
Is this really a situation about a gift to foreign officials, though? Isn’t that really intended to prevent one American official from bribing another country’s official?
I think that this falls under a gift from America to England. It won’t be the King’s personal property.
These gifts are classified as “gifts from the American people to the British people,” and I am fairly certain the law in question doesn’t apply. Queen Elizabeth, for example, received a a vintage American-made brooch from 1950 featuring 14-karat yellow gold, diamonds and moss agate. Sounds more valuable than 1200 to me, no? Indeed, I’m not sure how you would value gifts from the President to the King or vice-versa, since they would become collectors items from the second the gift were completed. The rule also seems to be that a President of First Lady can’t keep a gift if it is too valuable.
I think jd and the other defenders of this obstructive bureaucrat are deliberately ignoring the obvious, which is, again, that a good faith diplomatic gift between the two nations would not ordinarily be subjected to legal nitpicking, but Trump is “special.” And that’s why this never has happened before, not because of the nature of the gift.
There are two issues here to be resolved, not one. The value of the gift definitely applies to gifts from “the nation” to “other nation.” When Obama gave an iPad to Queen E2, it was discussed in the press why he was constrained by the rules to under 2K. And yes, I imagine a brooch like the one you described would be under 2K..or could be. The second issue is whether the president can call up the FDR library and say “hey, we want to give his wheelchair to Ghana!”. I can find no record of that happening. Now, MAYBE if Obama had asked, they would have ignored precedent, rule, or law, and done it. I tend to think not. BUT–I can guarantee that IF a librarian denied such a request, Obama wouldn’t have fired him. He would have said “well, guess the rules forbid me from doing that.” It was nice having presidents like that while it lasted.
BUT–I can guarantee that IF a librarian denied such a request, Obama wouldn’t have fired him.
I agree with that, Jerry. I also think out last, oh, six Presidents other than Trump, especially Biden, were far too forgiving and and didn’t fire nearly enough underlings who deserved to be fired.
Trump, meanwhile, has figured out that since the news media won’t let him be loved (which, as a narcissist, he craves) he has to concentrate on being feared, and Machiavelli wisely explained. No President has ever faced the organized disrespect and defiance Trump has, and it had damaged both his ability to govern and the Presidency itself. A clear message of “Don’t cross me, even on the little stuff” is mandatory this time around: he has no choice.
So it is ethical to ignore laws and regulations about:
Firing people
Using government property
Value of gifts
If you think people are going to defy you if you don’t?
This seems a kind of strange transactional authoritarian ethics?
Valid point, of course, but also a bit naive.Presidents by their very nature and the nature of the job violate many laws, most of them a lot more serious than whatever made it difficult for Trump to get the gift he wanted for King Charles. Sometimes, its a very serious law, like the law Congress passed forbidding him to give aid to Great Britain and Russia before we entered WWII. President traditionally get reasonable wiggle room because of utilitarian ethics, and letting a sword that as Ko-Ko would say, “never would be missed” in order to allow a President to salve some diplomatic wounds with a key ally seems to me to be a perfect example. Iran-Contra, not so much…
Ethical conduct can look naive, but I don’t think that diminishes its importance. Trump has bragged about not paying his taxes for years. Long before his presidency. Being casual about violating laws and rules when you are president is not good for the national ethical environment. Yes, it’s true that we’ve had presidents who were corrupt before. LBJ entered politics a poor man, and left it quite wealthy, funneling a lot of $ to his wife’s business interests (this began long before the presidency, as catalogued so well by Caro in his four volume biography. There was also a stolen election in TX). LBJ, JFK, and Nixon all used the FBI in ways that would be illegal today, probably were illegal then, and were definitely unethical. BUT–except for Nixon, their misconduct was hidden for years. It matters, I think, that this president is cavalier about the law and violating it. Firing prosecutors for refusing to indict his political enemies. Pressuring the DOJ to indict people. Publicly. It touches on the foundation of justice itself. No president has ever done that. EVER. Not Nixon at his worst. When Nixon merely commented on Manson’s trial, about how he was “obviously guilty” in a STATE murder trial, legal ethics folks criticized him, and the White House issued a retraction. Compared to Trump’s actions with the DOJ and federal prosecutions, that’s jaywalking against multiple homicide. Maybe I’m naive. If that’s what you want to call it. But we have benefited as a society from broad compliance with tax laws, and laws generally. If the most powerful man in the country brags about violating the law, brags about how he ignores regulations and laws…that cannot help but have consequences, bad ones.
I doubt it mattered in the slightest to King Charles. His staff likely just piled it on the trolley of gifts to go to a basement somewhere along with the other gifts. I do wonder at the practice of showering rare / expensive gifts on people who are already powerful and stratospherically wealthy and have zero reason to attach any value to such a gift. It’s not like Charles has any shortage of ceremonial swords…