Creator of fake presidential seal made it from spite
Charles Leazott hadn’t thought about the seal in months. The 46-year-old graphic designer threw it together after the 2016 presidential election — it was one part joke, one part catharsis. He used to be a proud Republican. He voted for George W. Bush twice.
But Donald Trump’s GOP was no longer his party, so he created a mock presidential seal to prove his point.
He replaced the arrows in the eagle’s claw with a set of golf clubs — a nod to the new president’s favorite pastime. In the other set of talons, he swapped out the olive branch for a wad of cash and replaced the United States’ Latin motto with a Spanish insult. Then, his coup de grace: a two-headed imperial bird lifted straight from the Russian coat of arms, an homage to the president’s checkered history with the adversarial country.
“This is the most petty piece of art I have ever created,” the Richmond, Virginia, resident said in an interview with The Washington Post.
The seal wasn’t meant for a wide audience. But years later, it wound up stretched across a screen behind an unwitting President Trump as he spoke to a conference packed with hundreds of his young supporters.
That was Tuesday. On Wednesday, The Post was the first to report that the seal was fake — and that neither the White House, nor Turning Point USA, the organizer of the starstudded Teen Student Action Summit, knew how it got there or where it came from. Leazott woke up Thursday and saw the news in a Reddit post as he drank his morning coffee. Then, a torrent of messages.
“It’s been chaos,” he said. “This is not what I expected when I woke up today.”
The faux seal was on the screen for at least 80 seconds, in plain sight but largely ignored as hundreds in the room at the Washington Marriott Marquis trained their attention on Trump.
But the modified symbol was loaded with jabs at the president — subtle and overt. The Russian eagle, an allusion to accusations that he embraced the Kremlin, and the Spanish script, a reference to Trump’s controversial border policies and his denigration of Latin American immigrants. Instead of E pluribus unum — “out of many, one” — Leazott wrote “45 es un títere,” or “45 is a puppet,” a callback to a viral exchange between Trump and Hillary Clinton in a 2016 debate.
By Thursday morning, the Turning Point spokesman said the group had identified the staff member responsible for turning Leazott’s design into a trending topic. The spokesman called the incident a last-minute oversight, the result of a quick online search to find a second high-resolution photo of the presidential seal to place behind Trump. He said the mistake was “unacceptable.”
“We did let the individual go,” the spokesman said. “I don’t think it was malicious intent, but nevertheless.”
Leazott doesn’t buy it. He thinks whoever was responsible had to know exactly what they were looking for. He believes the person dug up the image he created and used it intentionally.
“There’s no way this was an accident, is all I’m saying.”