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.
“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.
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.
“The truth is the American people are really focused on their day-to-day lives. They recognise President Trump is who he is, and he’s going to do what he thinks he needs to do.”
And this is what Trump has always done. He tried it with Trump Plaza and Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, Trump University and the ill-fated Trump Shuttle airline. Indeed, all these ventures failed. But Trump’s belief in the power of his personal brand never diminished.
Still, this time he’s using the power of the state, and playing with national finances, rather than his own.
As far as legacy building goes, it’s about as superficial as you can get. And Trump’s critics would say that’s his presidency in a nutshell: all show, little substance.
Writing for the British news and opinion site UnHerd, Michael Lind says Trump’s predilection for sticking his brand on everything “increasingly resembles a sign of weakness rather than strength”.
Others have pointed out Trump, who will be the oldest person to have ever held the office when he leaves the White House in three years, has a smaller window than most to craft a post-presidential legacy.
“Trump is putting his name on everything because he’s putting his legacy there,” Republican communications strategist Maura Gillespie told television network MS-NOW. “This just shows his insecurity and his fears about what his legacy will be.”
If Trump’s legacy is his brand, it’s a perilously impermanent one. Just as the next Democratic president (or perhaps even the next Republican) is certain to take down the derogatory plaques from Trump’s “presidential hall of fame” on the West Wing colonnade, Trump’s title can quickly be removed from the Kennedy Centre. Battleships and gold cards and bank accounts can easily be renamed.
Luckily for Trump, some allies have a more lasting legacy in mind for their favourite president. Anna Paulina Luna, a young congresswoman from Florida, has drafted a bill that would result in Trump’s face carved being into Mount Rushmore beside Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via Twitter or email.
