Name Game by Trump
I saw the name of this article as written by David A. Graham of the Atlantic and immediately thought of a fifty’s song “The Name Game” by Shirley Ellis. If you do not know what it is, no worries it went public in 1964. The song starts out “Come on, everybody. I say now, let’s play a game.” The actual article is entitled differently.
That is about where the similarity ends. Tru_p is serious about naming, renaming, and adding his name to various public sites. The newly appointed Kennedy Center Trustees (as appointed by Tru_p) decided to rename the center from the Kennedy Center to ‘The Trump Kennedy Center.’ Can a person be so vain or feel so little whereas they arbitrarily change the names of monuments, etc. through attention-seeking behavior? By the way the behavior is labeled as Histrionic personality disorder. Our president certainly fits the disorder as described. He is the president and number 30-something(?). I wonder if he will reverse the order so he can be first?
The United States of Donald Trump, The Atlantic.
Just as he did during his private-sector career, President Donald Trump is slapping his name and face on everything he can. The difference being is America’s institutions do not belong to him.
When President Donald Trump visited George Washington’s Mount Vernon in 2018, he reportedly showed little interest in the estate or in the first president. But Trump did have a critique of his predecessor. “If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” he reportedly said. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff, or no one remembers you.”
The advice might seem “truly bizarre,” as Mount Vernon’s CEO described the visit to others, but Trump practices what he preaches. Yesterday, the Trump White House announced that the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—which is chaired by Donald J. Trump, who was appointed to that role by Donald J. Trump, who also filled the board with fellow Trump appointees—would rename the venue the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. This was, the Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt opined, a tribute to “the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year” at the center, “not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction but also financially, and its reputation.”
This is a challenging claim from a factual standpoint. As The Washington Post found, ticket sales at the Kennedy Center have tanked since Trump’s hostile takeover of the institution in February. Patrons booed Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance at concerts this year. Events there have taken on an uncanny sheen of decay and mediocrity, my colleague Alexandra Petri reported after attending the Kennedy Center Honors last week.
The announcement is also challenging from a statutory perspective. The Kennedy Center’s name was bestowed by a law passed by Congress and can’t be changed by the board on its own. Tim Shriver, John F. Kennedy’s nephew, wrote on X, “Would they rename the Lincoln memorial? The Jefferson?”
Who’s to stop Trump, though? Workers began changing the signage this morning, and Congress seems unlikely to act; anyway, even if the name isn’t formally changed, nothing will prevent the president from calling it what he wants. Consider the Department of Defense, which the administration insists on calling the Department of War, despite the former name being established by law. Or more apropos, take the U.S. Institute of Peace, which was also established and named by Congress but which recently got a (rather premature) rebrand, with the facade now reading “Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace.” The gesture here is blunt. The president placing his own name before the nation’s is redolent of dictators in isolated countries—North Korea’s Kim family and Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov, who even renamed January after himself—and long-ago absolute monarchs such as Louis XIV, who is said to have declared, “L’état, c’est moi.”
In line with his view of himself not merely as an elected representative but as father of the nation (or perhaps “daddy” of the nation?), Trump has put his name and image in places large and small. His scowling visage is next to George Washington’s portrait on National Parks passes; for good measure, citizens can now enter parks for free on Trump’s birthday, which happens to be Flag Day, but no longer on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A new pay-for-play visa for the very rich is called the Trump Gold Card. The Treasury has proposed 250th-anniversary $1 coins with Trump’s face on them, a serious deviation from precedent. (The law bars printing money with images of living people on it but does not apply to minting coins.) Does anyone have any doubt what name he’ll put on his boondoggle ballroom at the White House?
This tendency is not new. Throughout his career, Trump has plastered his name on whatever he can, including many buildings, a hideous pair of sneakers, a bottle-water brand, a short-lived airline, a short-lived magazine, and a short-lived steak line. (At a 2016 primary-victory party, Trump displayed steaks bought at a local butcher but claimed that they were Trump Steaks.) The apotheosis came late in his real-estate career, when Trump had mostly stopped developing properties but continued to license his name to other builders. (Some Trump-branded buildings have removed his name in recent years, as his scandals and growing unpopularity have made it a liability.)
The difference is that those things belonged to Trump. The assets of the United States of America do not—they belong to the people. His change to the facade of the U.S. Institute of Peace is just graffiti. Putting his name on the Kennedy Center and parks passes are acts of vandalism of public property, in the most original sense of the word.
Many things in this country are named for former presidents, of course. The performing-arts center was established not by John F. Kennedy but as a memorial to him after his assassination. Trump, by contrast, is rechristening things for himself and then pretending it’s an honor rather than an ego trip. He asks not what he can do for his country, but what his country can name for him.