President Trump’s Oval Office trade-in of a portrait of President Jefferson for one of President Polk shows the 47th president to be a practitioner of not only the art of the deal, but also of the deal of the art. The exchange, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, appears to have been motivated more by enthusiasm for Polk than by any antipathy toward the wordsmith of the Declaration of Independence. 

Polk is no pisher. America’s 11th president was a disciple of President Jackson. He followed Old Hickory as an innovator of the populism to which Mr. Trump is heir. Polk defeated Henry Clay in the 1844 election. He pledged to serve only one term. He kept his word. It was an eventful term, though. He won the Mexican-American War. He annexed the Republic of Texas, and much else, including Oregon Territory and California.

What Jefferson was to the Southeast, Polk was to the Southwest. In contrast to Mr. Trump, though, Polk pressed for low tariffs. His push for war was opposed by a Whig backbencher from Illinois, Congressman Abraham Lincoln. It could be said that Polk’s push for expansion came at the expense of cohesion, as the sectarian tensions amplified by the additional territory lead to the Civil War that the Great Emancipator would be tasked with winning.

Lincoln sought to “distinguish himself” in Congress by objecting to Polk’s war, Harvard’s Houghton Library reports. Lincoln opposed letting a president “invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion.” It let Polk “make war at pleasure,” Lincoln warned. If “he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him?” Yet Lincoln lost re-election to the House.

The 47th president is more fond of the 11th. The Journal reports that he is wont to tell visitors that Polk “got a lot of land.” The portrait, painted after his death by a cousin, Rebecca Polk, appears to capture a president confident in the enlargements he effectuated. The 47th president appears to have similar designs in referencing Canada as the 51st state, eyeing Greenland, jostling for control of the Panama Canal, and dreaming of an American-controlled Gaza.

Polk’s partisans rallied under the cry of “54°40’ or Fight,” a reference to the border of Canada. They ultimately reached the 49th parallel. That pugilistic spirit could just as well apply to Mr. Trump and his supporters. It is no surprise that a real estate mogul would take an interest in territory or view land as the sine qua non of influence and might. Regardless, it is a change from the Obama-Biden ethos of retreat.

Mr. Trump is hardly the first president to send a message via his choice of White House portraiture. President Biden gave pride of place in the Oval Office to a picture of FDR, befitting Mr. Biden’s pretensions of recreating his predecessor’s coalition-building and legislative tsunami. President Reagan prominently positioned in the Cabinet Room a picture of President Coolidge, the famously taciturn proponent of limited government and fiscal prudence. 

Mr. Trump appears attuned to the portraits of power. CNN reports that he has tripled the number of paintings hanging in the Oval Office. There is also “gold everywhere,” including “gilded Rococo mirrors on the doors.” Mr. Trump tells the Spectator that the project “keeps my real estate juices flowing.” Polk is joined in the Oval Office by Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Lincoln, Jackson, and Reagan — and the leader of the pack, Washington himself.