In April 2018, during his first term as US president, Donald Trump visited George Washington’s former residence and plantation at Mount Vernon in Virginia with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron.
A year later, US news site Politico reported a telling anecdote from the guided tour, citing three sources briefed on the event. Washington, Trump had said, should have stuck his name on the historic compound.
President Donald Trump last week after announcing a new class of warship – named after himself.Credit: AP
“If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” Trump reportedly said. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.”
It certainly tracks as something the brash businessman, Apprentice star and marketing enthusiast might say. And now in his second term, with the political history books beckoning, Trump is acting on that impulse by whacking his own name on pretty much anything he can find.
He has created Trump Accounts for newborns, renamed the US Institute of Peace the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, hung a banner of his face outside the Department of Agriculture, introduced the Trump Gold Card to fast-track residency for wealthy migrants, commissioned a “Trump Class” battleship for the navy and affixed his name to one of the country’s prime cultural spaces, the Kennedy Centre in Washington, DC.
Some of this stuff is legally dubious – the Kennedy Centre is thus named by an act of Congress – but nonetheless, it has the hallmarks of dictatorship, where citizens are expected to bow at the altar of the great, infallible leader. To see it in the United States of America is jarring, even if one might argue it’s more narcissism than fascism.
New signage adding Trump’s name to the Kennedy Centre in Washington was unveiled last week.Credit: AP
Republican strategist Matt Terrill, who was chief of staff on Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign and now runs lobby shop Firehouse Strategies, says the majority of Americans are not concerned about the buildings Trump is putting his name on.
“It’s a very Washington, DC-centric story,” he says. “If you go around the country, no one I talk to outside the beltway of Washington is talking about that. They’re talking about how inflation is coming down, gas prices are coming down.
