With Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office, the bust of Winston Churchill has reappeared there, once again highlighting the divide over Churchill by Republican and Democratic leaders in this country — a divide that began with President Obama when he removed the Churchill bust that had been placed prominently in the oval office by George W. Bush. Bush received the bust as a symbol of the “special relationship” between Britain and the U.S. in July 2001. Apparently, there are two Churchill busts. The original bust was given to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Decades later when that was being restored by specialists, British Prime Minister Tony Blair sent a second bust that matched the original in appearance. When Obama became president, the second copy was returned to Britain while the original bust was placed in the White House residence instead of the Oval Office. When Trump took office in 2017, the Churchill bust returned to the Oval Office. Four years later, President Biden (or whoever was making such decisions for him) conspicuously removed the Churchill bust from the Oval Office. Biden’s handlers frequently had him seated for photographs and news events in the Oval Office next to a bust of Robert F. Kennedy. There was a time when leading Democrats revered Churchill. President John F. Kennedy made Churchill an honorary U.S. citizen. Churchill’s accomplishments dwarfed anything done by Bobby Kennedy, who was named attorney general at the insistence of patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy, who wanted Bobby there to protect the president from his own foibles. The old man knew all about Jack’s reckless proclivities (womanizing and keeping company with the mob) because he shared them — they seem to have been part of the Kennedy DNA. And back when Joe was FDR’s ambassador to the Court of St. James, he repeatedly badmouthed Churchill while recommending the appeasement of Hitler. (RELATED: Churchill’s Citadel: His ‘Wilderness Years’ Headquarters) When appeasement became a dirty word and Hitler’s actions proved Churchill right, Joe Kennedy knew his presidential prospects were over. So he called on his friend Arthur Krock of the New York Times to help JFK transform his senior thesis at Harvard into a book Why England Slept. (Even back then Times reporters shilled for Democrats). If Joseph P. Kennedy couldn’t become president, he was intent on seeing to it that one of his sons would. When his son Joe was killed during the war, John F. Kennedy was next in line and Why England Slept would hopefully remove the tarnish of the old man’s appeasement. But there was another problem. JFK, then working for the Office of Naval Intelligence, was involved in a torrid relationship with Inga Arvad, a beautiful blonde journalist who was married and who the FBI suspected was a German spy. When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called Joe Kennedy about the relationship, the patriarch told JFK to end the affair, and JFK was transferred to the South Pacific. While all of this was going on, Winston Churchill was saving our civilization from falling into, in his words, a “new Dark Age.” (RELATED: The Secret to Winston Churchill’s Greatness) So why did the last two Democratic presidents remove Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office? It may have something to do with colonialism. Churchill, after all, was an imperialist. He famously remarked that he did not become Prime Minister to preside over the end of the British Empire. He opposed self-rule for India. He gloried in Britain’s colonial rule. That 19th-century outlook (Churchill was very much a 19th-century man) doesn’t sit well with the DEI-driven Democratic Party of the 21st century. Obama in his first term famously apologized to the Muslim world for America’s past sins; he certainly wasn’t going to highlight the achievements of a British imperialist. Biden’s White House, we now know, was effectively run by former Obama staffers who were likely only too happy to remove Churchill’s bust and choreograph Biden’s public Oval Office meetings so that RFK’s bust was situated behind the president (perhaps oblivious to the fact that RFK approved the bugging of Martin Luther King, Jr.). Trump, like George W. Bush before him, and almost every U.S. president — Republican and Democrat — reaching back to FDR recognized Churchill’s greatness. Trump’s restoration of Churchill in the Oval Office means that the battle of the Churchill bust continues. READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: Churchill’s Citadel: His ‘Wilderness Years’ Headquarters Remembering the Prophetic Power of James Burnham’s ‘Lenin’s Heir’ Robert Kaplan’s Weimar Analogy Ignores Mackinder’s Final Word on Geopolitics The post Churchill Bust Returns to the Oval Office appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.