June 20, 2025 11:04 AM UTC

Poll: Is It Time to Ditch the Presidential Portraits in the State Capitol?

• 7 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

As we noted a few months ago, President Trump somehow finally noticed that he has a portrait hanging in the State Capitol — a likeness that does not please his Orangeness — and this non-controversy has generated new questions about why we hang pictures of Presidents in a state capitol in general.

As The Colorado Sun reports in its “Unaffiliated” newsletter:

The committee overseeing historic preservation at the Colorado Capitol is mulling whether to replace the presidential portraits hanging in the building’s third-floor rotunda with paintings of the state’s former governors.

The idea was floated at the panel’s gathering last month in response to the controversy earlier this year that followed President Donald Trump’s complaints about how he looked in his Colorado Capitol portrait. The painting was removed in response and there’s currently an awkward blank space in the rotunda above a placard marking Trump’s White House tenures.

Dawn DiPrince, president and CEO of History Colorado, told fellow members of the Capitol Building Advisory Committee that the controversy presents an opportunity as Colorado prepares to celebrate the sesquicentennial anniversary of its statehood, which is next year.

“Capitols for a state should really be a celebration of the state,” she said. “I feel like Colorado’s 150th birthday is a really wonderful time to do that. It does not make sense to me to take up such a significant amount of space in our state’s Capitol when we don’t even have space to hang all of our governors’ portraits.”

Right now, a limited number of gubernatorial portraits are displayed on rotation on the first floor of the Capitol.

Colorado and Texas are the only states that display portraits of every U.S. president in their state Capitols. [Pols emphasis]

Just that last fact alone makes us want to reconsider the portraiture (is that a word?) in the State Capitol.

But what say you, Polsters? Cast your vote below in our totally non-scientific poll…

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