President Trump is on a roll. In the past couple of weeks, he’s named the Kennedy Center, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and a new class of battleships after himself.
It may seem that he sometimes mixes up the rationales for these namings. The Navy will direct the design of the battleships “along with me,” Trump said yesterday, “because I’m a very aesthetic person.” That, of course, may better explain the sudden appearance of his name before that of President Kennedy on D.C.’s premier cultural center. Trump did invoke national-security concerns yesterday, but that was in connection with his termination of offshore wind farm leases, though the administration has yet to offer an explanation of how those wind farms affected national security. In fact, Trump’s war on wind farms may well be at least partly aesthetic, since his animus toward them is apparently rooted in his seeing one such assemblage of turbines just offshore one of his golf courses in Scotland, presumably compromising the view, and hence the monetary value, of his property.
But this battleship business looks to be partly aesthetic, too. “Dating back to his first term,” The New York Times reports, “Mr. Trump has criticized the look of the Navy’s fleet and called for a return of the World War II-era vessels that were armed with 16-inch guns that were largely phased out for aircraft carriers whose warplanes could strike targets many hundreds of times farther away.” Big ships with big guns clearly appeal to Trump, even though naval officials recognized how fatally uncompetitive they were as early as three days after Pearl Harbor, when Japanese aircraft sunk the battleship that had been the prize of the British navy, HMS Prince of Wales, off the coast of Malaya. In reaction to Trump’s announcement, a host of naval experts have stated that they believed these Trump-class vessels would be sitting ducks for enemy forces, recommending instead smaller, faster, and more mobile vessels.
But it’s size, not substance, that matters to Trump, as his continual demands to create an ever-larger ballroom on White House grounds makes clear.
Well, it’s not just size; it’s the Trump name. Back when he was merely a developer, Trump eventually stopped developing and opted instead to simply have his name plastered on a host of buildings. That didn’t require him to cover much if any of the expenses entailed in actually building something, even if those expenses were themselves covered by bank loans he might, or might not, repay. (See: Trump bankruptcy filings.) Now, as president, he can indulge his need for self-aggrandizement far beyond anything he could do in the private sector. Along with his racism, cruelty, and autocratic tendencies, this is surely what future historians will highlight as the hallmark of his presidency.
But let’s be fair. Trump could argue that it was his appointees to the Kennedy Center board who decided to put his name above Kennedy’s, and the State Department that slapped his name on the Institute of Peace. (He hasn’t argued that, of course, because he loves being able to name things after himself. After all, Napoleon crowned himself emperor; why shouldn’t Trump?)
Nonetheless, the Kennedy Center board and the State Department have laid out a course that all patriotic Americans could easily follow. Why should it be just Trump’s minions who name valuable entities after him? What’s stopping our most prominent cities from naming their sewer systems after him? (Of course, Trump would send in the Army to any city that did that, but surely some city councilmembers could introduce resolutions to that effect.) What’s stopping our citizenry from affixing Post-its or other sticky little things with Trump’s name on them to public toilets? What better way for freedom-loving Americans to express their love of country, to capture the zeitgeist of 2026? We all can name things after Donald Trump, and shame on us if we don’t.