President Donald Trump’s reported effort to hold a giant infrastructure project hostage unless he gets to rename Washington-Dulles International Airport and New York’s Penn Station after himself, on the surface, seems like yet another of his narcissistic gambits. But taken with all his other efforts at self-commemoration, it should also be seen as something more: an authoritarian tactic to dominate the public’s consciousness.
Since October, Trump has frozen funds for a $16 billion project to create new rail tunnels between New York and New Jersey. His attempted justification was that his administration needed to scrutinize the project and ensure compliance with its purge of “diversity, equity and inclusion” hiring practices. The suspension of funds has already resulted in the loss of some 1,000 construction jobs, and thousands more are in jeopardy.
On Friday night, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unblock the funding while the various lawsuits over the project continue. That’s good news for commuters and workers — if the administration complies.
It is standard fare for autocratic leaders to erase boundaries between themselves and the state.
But Punchbowl News reported on Thursday that, in January, Trump told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., that he would unfreeze the funds if Schumer agreed to rename Dulles Airport and Penn Station in his name. MS NOW has independently confirmed the report. Schumer has no direct oversight over either of those places, and he rejected the demand.
This isn’t normal political dealmaking. It’s an abuse of power. The president is interfering with funds that were already allocated by Congress for an important public works project in order to effectively skim something off the top for himself (even if in this case he’s trying to secure symbolic power, and not money). As my colleague Steve Benen put it, it’s an “attempt at extortion.”
And as Benen detailed, his obsession with renaming things after himself is unrelenting:
Trump and his allies have now applied the president’s name to the Kennedy Center and to the Institute of Peace, announced the construction of ‘Trump-class’ battleships, unveiled a commemorative legal-tender coin that will feature his face on both sides and have launched ‘Trump Gold Cards,’ ‘Trump Accounts’ and ‘TrumpRx’ (the government’s new drug-pricing website). By some accounts, the president wants the forthcoming White House ballroom to be named after him, too.
Presidential historians have pointed out that Trump’s renaming spree is unprecedented; typically a president is commemorated by other people after the president dies.
But Trump’s insistence on plastering his name is not only a matter of troubling self-obsession; it also serves a political purpose — by making him seem more powerful than he is. It is standard fare for autocratic leaders to erase boundaries between themselves and the state. Turkmenistan’s late strongman leader Saparmurat Niyazov made his birthday a national holiday, which involved over-the-top celebrations of him, including military parades and a declaration by his ministers that he was a prophet from God. In North Korea’s totalitarian state, cultish praise and ubiquitous imagery of the country’s leaders are an essential part of the government’s social structures designed to induce the public to submit before its authoritarian leader. The effect of these social rituals is to make a leader appear invincible, untouchable. As The Boston Globe pointed out in December in its analysis of Trump’s renaming obsession, strongmen across history often compelled their subjects or allies to participate in the spectacle of renaming: Allies of Rome’s Julius Caesar, Germany’s Adolf Hitler, the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, India’s Narendra Modi, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan named sports stadiums, cities, roads, schools, and other public buildings after them. In this specific situation, it seems Trump is unlikely to get what he wants because there’s no way that Schumer — who has already refused — could give him what he wants. But we should expect Trump to continue angling to add his name and his visage everywhere he possibly can. Like so many aspiring strongmen before him, Trump views cultural omnipresence as a gateway to political omnipotence. But given that Trump is manifestly not all-powerful, right now, many people can see it for what it is: graffiti.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy. 
