Naming Rights

Parsing an Obsession

Before the holidays, we happened to be driving by the Kennedy Center in Washington with our grandsons, Ben, twenty-one, and Pete, twenty, the morning that a crew added Donald Trump’s name to the building.

l sensed that this close-up look at the Trump presidency could be as memorable to them as images of John F. Kennedy’s assassination was for their grandparents so long ago.

Then, days after Trump’s rebranding of the nation’s memorial performing arts center, Kennedy’s granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg died of leukemia at thirty-five. The message Trump chose to share on Truth Social was: “The Trumps have always been supporters of the arts. The Kennedys are supporters of the Kennedys.”

By now we should be attuned to the scale of Trump’s multiple obsessions and stunning insults. Once in possession of the Kennedy Center, he ordered it closed for construction under his direction and presumably to his taste. Trump wanted a Nobel Peace Prize so badly that he eagerly accepted someone else’s prize and then told the prime minister of Norway that he would seize Greenland because he had deserved the prize. In his remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he confused Greenland and Iceland.

And his press secretary insisted that, despite video evidence, he had not been confused. Claiming the prize, the Greenland demands, denying irrefutable video of what he had said — it’s all bonkers.

Did anyone vote for Trump to take Greenland or so that he could get the Nobel Peace Prize?

Having Trump’s name emblazoned everywhere has been a long-standing fixation. The shimmering Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan was built in 1983, followed by additional high-rises in New York and casinos in Atlantic City. Then he started licensing his name around the world, including to buildings he did not build.

Placing your name on edifices and a range of other things because you paid for them or squeezed the recipients into awarding the distinction has always been a function of some deep-rooted, primordial need for recognition in your lifetime.

By his own personal designation, and in amassing things with his name enshrined where he could bask in the glory, Trump is the all-around GOAT (“greatest of all time”).

In recent years, others in our gilded age have been similarly prodigious in having their names attached to their philanthropy and activities as they were launched. I have noticed two in particular.

David M. Rubinstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group, a major asset manager, is an American history buff, and he has made significant contributions to preserving our heritage. Thank you.

He is also omnipresent by name as the chair of organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Kennedy Center — the latter before Trump ousted him and took the position for himself. Although not a natural media presence, he hosts interview programs on C-SPAN, PBS, CNN, and Bloomberg, and in leading public venues in New York and Washington — always with the imprimatur of David M. Rubenstein.

Repeat the same word over and over, and after a while it sounds silly. The same with names.

Stephen A. Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone, is another billionaire and serial brander of his many activities, buildings, and programs. His penchant for naming glory does not guarantee admiration from people he doubtless would like to impress.

Some years ago, Paul Volcker, the great former chair of the Federal Reserve, was invited to the grand Fifth Avenue home of the New York Public Library to talk about his new memoir in its largest venue. He declined.

“I don’t go into the Schwarzman building” (which is what the NYPL building is now called), he told me, his publisher, when I informed him of the offer.

Excessive glorification can become self-parody, raising the question of why it is so ardently pursued by rich notables in their lifetimes, rather than postmortem, as was generally the case in the past. Is it vanity, insecurity, vulgarity? It could well be all three.

As regards the president, the Washington Post is keeping track. Aside from the Trump imprimaturs already adopted, there is the projected class of Trump battleships and a Trump fighter jet called the F-47, for the number of his presidency.

And these being bruited: A Washington NFL stadium, a triumphal arch on the National Mall, the grandiose White House ballroom, and, it has been reported, the rebranding of Dulles Airport and the people movers there to be called “Direct Jet Transports” — DJT, get it? Just this past week, Trump tried to pressure Senator Chuck Schumer to rename Dulles Airport and New York’s Penn Station after himself, as a condition for freeing up federal funding for a rail tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey.

The coming question is what happens after he is, one way or another, gone from the scene. Whose role will it be to rename so many artifacts of his era? Can the names be resold, as happened when Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center’s main concert hall, became David Geffen Hall in exchange for a donation of $100 million?

Names can also lose luster as selling tools. When Trump was still a developer, he bought up industrial lands and abandoned railyards on Manhattan’s West Side along the Hudson River and erected a string of high-rise apartment buildings that dominated that stretch of skyline.

The buildings had Trump-style accoutrements, including his name. After Trump became president, condo owners and tenants removed the nomenclature. What was known as Trump Place is now a series of numbered buildings on Riverside Boulevard.

Trump had intended to put up the world’s tallest building there. That did not happen. The swankiest residential, office, and retail area on the West Side now is further to the south. It is called Hudson Yards, named for the majestic river discovered by the explorer Henry Hudson more than four centuries ago.

And there is a stretch of the West Side Highway along much of this same route, which is named after another icon closely identified with New York, Joe DiMaggio, an honor justly bestowed after his death.

Naming rights that are legitimate honors should be awarded, rather than solicited, demanded, or just outright paid for.

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I should explain that this Substack is branded with my name as a condition of its being called Public Affairs Press, to distinguish it from the publishing imprint I founded, which is now owned by Hachette and is still called PublicAffairs.

Used appropriately, I am in favor of names as signifiers, not as cockeyed displays of self-anointed eminence.