AP Photo/Evan Vucci; AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
- President Biden moved a button former President Trump used to order Diet Coke to the Oval Office.
- Trump revealed in 2017 that when he pressed a button on his Oval Office desk, a White House butler would bring him soda.
- The call button isn’t new — Obama was pictured with it too — but it’s no longer on the Resolute Desk.
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A button former President Donald Trump used to order Diet Cokes while sitting at the Resolute Desk in the White House has apparently been moved since President Joe Biden took office.
Trump first showed off the wooden call box in 2017 interviews with the Associated Press and the Financial Times. He showed reporters that with a push of a red button, a White House butler would bring him a glass of soda in the Oval Office.
In the years after, Trump was pictured regularly with the rectangular wooden box on the desk, right next to his phones.
The call button is not new and isn’t only used for soda – President Barack Obama was once pictured with it on a table during a lunch with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
But Biden appears to have moved the call button off his desk.
Instead, photos of his desk on Biden's first day of office show two phones, a coffee cup, a set of pens. It's unclear where the call button went.
—Tom Newton Dunn (@tnewtondunn) January 21, 2021
Presidents almost always redesign the Oval Office upon taking office, and the call button wasn't the only thing Biden changed.
Biden replaced a portrait of President Andrew Jackson with a portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and opted to feature a number of progressives and activists through the room, including Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, and labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez.
He also chose to display portraits of Benjamin Franklin, President Thomas Jefferson, and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.
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