President-elect’s status as a pet-free president makes him an outlier among American chief executives. When President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden’s belongings are swiftly removed from the White House during President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, one thing that will leave with them will almost certainly not be replaced – a White House pet.
![[Numerous recent presidents, including Obama, have had pets in the White House]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/20/14/GettyImages-87365714.jpg)
Unlike the official residence of the British Prime Minister, there is no “chief mouser” for the Executive Office of the President who remains in office from administration to administration. While President Harry Truman once famously remarked that the only sure way to find a friend in the American capital was to “get a dog,” President-elect Trump has chosen to keep his White House among the 55 percent of American residences that don’t have a canine companion among them.
The former turned future president has never been a dog lover, and when he first entered the White House in 2017 that brought to an end decades of uninterrupted pitter-patter of four-legged furry friends around the hallways of the West Wing and the Executive Mansion.
In fact he’s the first in more than 100 years to not have some type of pet as his side. Trump’s rhetoric has always been peppered with canine references, usually suggestions that a person he doesn’t like has done something negative “like a dog.”.
Sometimes, he’s gone further, such in a 2018 tweet when he called out former staffer turned tell-all book writer Omarosa Manigault Newman following the release of her White House memoir, Unhinged, writing: “When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”.
