Bust of Sir Winston Churchill moved back into Oval Office on Trump’s first day
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Donald Trump wastes no time in reinstating Jacob Epstein’s sculpture of Britain’s wartime prime minister. Donald Trump moved quickly after returning to the White House to reinstate a bust of Britain’s Second World War Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill in the Oval Office, a move he also made in 2017.
![[George W Bush was the original recipient of the Churchill bust and posed with it in the Oval Office in July 16 2001]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/21/13/newFile-3.jpg)
Trump was sworn in as America’s 47th president on Monday at a lavish ceremony in the US Capitol rotunda and immediately set to work issuing a deluge of executive orders, covering everything from immigration to the climate. But the former luxury hotelier also found time to revamp the interior decor of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and promptly ordered the return of the sculpture, designed by the celebrated British-American artist Sir Jacob Epstein and originally gifted to his Republican predecessor George W Bush by the British government in 2001.
Democrat Barack Obama subsequently caused a minor diplomatic rift by shifting the bust to a table outside the White House’s Treaty Room when he took office in 2008, giving its spot to one of the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr instead. His doing so prompting criticism from then-London mayor Boris Johnson, the future PM and Churchill biographer, who suggested Obama had been motivated by an “ancestral dislike of the British Empire”.
