The Trump Kennedy Center: Trumpgrad's Newest Attraction
The president is slapping his name and face on things like a five-year-old with a sticker book.
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Uriel Epshtein is the CEO of the Renew Democracy Initiative.
Donald Trump likes to put his name on things.
Call it a family tradition. Worn-down wooden signs emblazoned with “Trump Village” in front of Coney Island apartment blocks are a holdover of the real estate career of Fred Trump, the president’s father. The prodigal son upgraded his dad’s style with the now-familiar golden letters that announce the entrance to Trump Tower and any number of other properties.
Those golden letters will soon adorn the Kennedy Center—excuse me, the Trump Kennedy Center. The cultural institution’s Trump-appointed board voted for the renaming earlier today.
It’s perfectly appropriate to have institutions named for deceased and former leaders to preserve the memory of their service and accomplishments. There’s also no problem with building a personal brand and naming buildings after yourself as a private businessman.
But doing that as the sitting president of the United States? That’s another matter entirely. And President Trump (and those seeking to curry favor with him) has been slapping his name and face on things like a five-year old with a sticker book.
The Kennedy Center news comes just a week after the administration launched a new fast-track visa for wealthy applicants dubbed the Trump Gold Card (yes, it’s actually called that). For what it’s worth, the idea of investment citizenship is completely reasonable—many countries, the US included, already have programs that prioritize immigration for those who can contribute to the economy.
The problem isn’t the policy, but the packaging. And packaging matters.
Before the Gold Card, it was the US Institute of Peace, now the Donald J. Trump US Institute of Peace. And his face on a giant banner adorning the Department of Labor’s headquarters.
And before that, it was the US Mint’s plan to produce a coin—legal tender—with Trump’s likeness on it, in violation of custom and possibly law.
Before and during the recent government shutdown, the websites of nonpartisan executive agencies employed decidedly partisan language to attack the president’s political opponents. I’m no lawyer (much to my mother’s chagrin), but that seems like a pretty obvious breach of the Hatch Act, which aims to keep federal employees and executive agencies out of electoral politics.
Every day, the TrumpTM brand finds its way into another previously apolitical sphere of American society.
My parents were born in the USSR, a place where communist leaders were deified in life. Stalingrad was renamed just two years into the eponymous dictator’s reign.
I want to say “we don’t do things like that in America,” but in recent days, too many people will shrug and ask: “Why not?”
To answer that question, we have to wind the clock back almost a century.
In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration as a response to the Great Depression. The WPA and similar agencies employed millions and helped pull the country out of economic freefall.
But some began to feel that FDR, a Democrat, was leveraging these expansive New Deal agencies to create a national political machine using taxpayer dollars. Remember, these were huge institutions, organizing a massive segment of the population. The potential for abuse was real.
So Senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico put forward legislation barring federal employees and executive agencies from certain types of political activity. That’s the Hatch Act that I mentioned earlier.
(Two points worth noting here: First, Senator Hatch was a Democrat challenging a Democratic president. Second, Roosevelt signed the Hatch Act into law even though it challenged his agenda. Going against your party on principle. Respecting the separation of powers. Positively quaint ideas!)
The Hatch Act is just one of several laws on the books that endeavor to keep government—e.g. running things—separate from politics—e.g. running for office. In the case of the Kennedy Center, the organization’s guidelines state that “no additional memorials or plaques shall be designated or installed.”
If you wouldn’t want a Democratic president using the Oval Office or the awesome powers of the federal government to advance their party’s electoral prospects, don’t cede that power to a Republican. Unless, of course, your goal is to pull every lever, no matter how illegal or unfair, in order to ensure power never changes hands again, in which case… at least be honest?
There’s such a thing as incumbent advantage. You’re going to see Trump on TV a lot because, well, he’s the president. That’s absolutely normal. But creating a cult of personality around a single man that permeates every aspect of public life—through rebranding cultural institutions, immigration programs, even our money? That’s un-American, un-republican, and, in many cases, unlawful.
There’s a strategic kicker that makes this (re)naming business all the more damaging. Every monument to Trump’s ego is a reminder that the way to the president’s heart is through flattery. His American supplicants give him buildings and banners. The Qataris, a 747 jumbo jet. Tim Cook, a personalized plaque with the shape of the Apple logo atop a 24 karat gold base. If this is all it takes to grab the president’s attention, then the government’s priorities end up totally warped. Instead of appealing to the public interest, anyone who wants the government to enact a certain policy ends up appealing to Trump’s personal interest. So billions of dollars of taxpayer money, military guarantees, and countless other momentous national decisions end up being influenced by the foreign government or company that gives the president the shiniest bauble—or whoever can scrawl Trump’s name on the side of a building the fastest.
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More from The Next Move:
The Privatization of American Power
In Russia, we had a joke about Putin. The dictator was an improbable Karl Marx-Adam Smith combo: expenses nationalized, profits privatized.
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Thanks Uriel, great article. I found some new material for my next update, see: https://avddemocracy.substack.com/p/cult-of-donald-watch-part-i
He'll replace Mozart with the UFC.