'Brand extension on steroids': How Trump aims to be 'the boss of everyone and everything'
President Donald Trump’s “gauche” habit of naming everything after himself is more than just a quirk picked up by his narcissistic father; it is, quite literally, a threat to our republic.
“He got it from his father, Fred Trump,” USA Today's Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy reported in an interview with Barbara Res, a former executive vice president at Trump Organization who oversaw major projects like building Trump Tower in the 1980s. The elder Trump was a wealthy New York City real estate developer who raised his son to inherit that empire and expand it.
“He (the president) was raised to believe that he was different and his family was different,” Res said. “And by different, I mean better than and more important than anyone else.” Res was a close adviser to the younger Trump from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.
Jeffrey Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, added that Trump’s renaming obsession speaks to a deeper authoritarian trend in his governing style.
“The leader is the state is what those messages are trying to convey,” Engel told Ramaswamy. “And in our country, the leader's not the state, the people are the state.”
He added that there are only two reasons why presidents’ names are added to buildings and other important institutions only after they have died. The first is that doing otherwise is “gauche”; the second is that “more importantly, this is still a constitutional republic.”
Despite the fact that renaming important institutions after a living president implies that America is a dictatorship rather than a constitutional republic, Ramaswamy noted that “the 79-year-old commander-in-chief’s name has been inserted into decades-old establishments such as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the U.S. Institute of Peace. He’s also slapped his name on key policies including TrumpRX, Trump Gold Card, Trump Coin and Trump Accounts.”
Ramaswamy added, “Federal buildings – including the Department of Labor, Department of Agriculture and Department of Justice – unfurled large banners with Trump’s face on them over the past few months. Lawmakers have sought to cater to Trump's ego with legislation to put him on Mount Rushmore. The latest canvas? The Treasury Department announced in March that Trump’s signature will appear on future U.S. paper currency in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary.”
Veteran reporter Michael Wolff reported in February that Trump initially wanted the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which was named after the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, to be named solely after himself.
"His first idea was to call this the Trump Center,” Wolff explained, adding that Trump asked, “Why does this have to be Kennedy? That was such a long time ago.” He then insisted that because Trump himself had been “almost assassinated," the name on the center should be his alone.
“You can’t say, ‘This is a terrible idea. This is a megalomaniacal idea. This is not good politics.’ You just cannot say any of that stuff to Trump,” Wolff explained regarding the perspective of those who work for Trump. “So instead, they said, ‘Well, why don’t we call it the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center?’”
Wolff added, "It’s a perfect Trump setup. He goes for the absurd, and he settles for the outlandish."
Also in February it was reported that Trump told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) that he would lift his hold on $16 billion for a long-planned railway project connected New York and New Jersey if Washington Dulles International Airport and New York’s Penn Station were both renamed for him. Two unnamed sources later told CNN that Schumer "swiftly rejected" Trump's demand.