His wish has come true: He has forever aggravated the libs, especially his Palm Beach neighbors.
Somewhere back in December, I swore an oath to singlehandedly dominate the “Trump renames stuff after himself” beat here at National Review, and that was because I realized that it provided a fascinatingly cramped (yet clear) window into the inner workings of the man’s soul. As my readers will remember, I first keyed into this when he started reshaping the White House in ways both great and small. When he illegally and peremptorily renamed the Kennedy Center as “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center” — despite his being neither dead nor particularly well liked — a thesis began to congeal.
Aside from being a civic outrage, it was a self-defeating debacle; Trump soon had to humiliatingly announce the center’s closure “for renovations” — during America’s 250th anniversary season, no less — because of the refusal of artists to play there. But he sure wasn’t going to take his name off the place. Leave the politics of that to someone else. And until then? There his name sits, atop an empty building once known as a centerpiece of D.C.’s cultured liberal elites. Trump Was Here, and there is nothing those who hate him can ever do about it. It was a troll, in other words — and an unanswerable one aesthetically, at least temporarily.
Once word filtered down, in February, that Trump was badgering Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to rename Penn Station or Dulles Airport after him (regardless of the actual impossibility of doing these things in two blue states), the pattern became clear enough to me: Donald Trump understands his impending political mortality on some level — whether subconscious or rational — and is determined as much as Ozymandias ever was to make sure that subsequent generations look upon his works and despair. The pattern of both megalomania and attempts at a “dominance play” — a reminder, for all of his most devoted haters, that he is sovereign over them — was too clear too ignore.
Therefore, a brief note about news that broke too late to make this morning’s Carnival of Fools: After months of pushing by the administration, Palm Beach Airport in Florida has been officially renamed “President Donald J. Trump International Airport.” The (GOP-dominated) Florida legislature approved it, and Governor Ron DeSantis signed it into law, so – unlike Trump’s Kennedy Center adventure – this name change is likely to stick. (It is also, unlike Dulles, Trump’s actual home airport, given his residence at Mar-a-Lago.)
It is the first time an American airport has ever been renamed after a sitting president — JFK had to be shot dead first, Reagan had to be out of office for a decade and stricken with Alzheimer’s, George H. W. Bush had to be tooling around in a golf cart in the Houston suburbs, etc. — and so that fact alone is a remarkable violation of norms for the sake of personal vanity. But then what else is new in the Trump era? The only political norms seemingly left nowadays are those that haven’t fallen cross-wise of the president’s overweening, and increasingly grasping, ego.
Although he was almost certainly unserious in pushing for his name to be on Dulles or Penn Station, in this case Trump’s real wish has come true: He has forever aggravated the libs, especially his Palm Beach neighbors. Understand something about Florida’s political geography: While the Sunshine State, thanks to a long string of successful Republican governors, is now most assuredly red, it still retains pockets of defiant Democratic resistance, and much of it is located in Broward and Palm Beach Counties. The richest Florida Democrats — the sorts of people who fled the Upper East Side of Manhattan for tax reasons but imported their politics to their new home — all fly in and out of Palm Beach International Airport. And now they will see Donald Trump’s name (and likely his grinning visage) every time they travel.
It’s a victory for Donald Trump, most assuredly. But for who else?