President Trump has installed plaques beneath the White House's presidential portraits featuring inflammatory language and insults directed at predecessors, particularly Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

The plaques include Trump-centered interpretations of presidential history, references to “the Biden Crime Family” and “Fake News Media,” and claim Ronald Reagan was “a fan of President Donald J. Trump.”

Mark Brockway, assistant teaching professor of political science, notes that the plaques may seem ridiculous and are certainly a ham-fisted approach to pushing a message. “But they really are a way to reaffirm the narrative that everything that’s wrong in the world is because of somebody else,” he says.

He points to the use of vague language and superlatives in the Biden and Obama plaques in particular―with lines like “worst president in American history.”

“It doesn’t make clear why Biden is the worst president in history, but that lack of clarity allows anyone to latch onto the idea that he was terrible,” Brockway says. “And then Donald Trump gets his power from being the guy that is fighting these folks and having this powerful enemy he needs to go against. So the more vague and the more weird that enemy is, the more powerful Donald Trump becomes.”