Trump’s bid to name Penn Station after himself looks like a presidential shakedown | Mohamad Bazzi

2 hours ago 3

As a real estate developer, Donald Trump built his empire on ostentatious displays of wealth, substantial tax breaks – and lots of free publicity. As president, he has deployed the power of the state to expand his personal brand, adding his name to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the US Institute of Peace, a class of new navy warships, and even investment accounts for millions of children.

Trump is now eyeing yet more grandiose targets in his self-aggrandizement spree. He wants Congress to rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington Dulles international airport in his honor. But there’s a catch: Trump reportedly told Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, that he would unfreeze billions of dollars in federal funding for a major infrastructure project in the north-east – if Schumer supported renaming the two sites.

The president seemingly threatened to hold federal funding, which had already been approved by Congress, hostage in his relentless campaign of self-promotion. Even by the standards that Trump set after a year back in the White House, when he has systematically dismantled anti-corruption laws built over decades and used the presidency to enrich himself and his family, trading naming rights as a political favor is a new low. Trump appears to have tried to leverage a $16bn transportation project to build a rail tunnel under the Hudson River, connecting New York and New Jersey, for his personal glorification.

Over the past few weeks, Trump and his aides offered shifting explanations regarding whether he sought to extract naming rights in exchange for restoring federal funds – and why the administration had suspended the project’s funding in the first place.

After reports of the quid pro quo surfaced this month, Trump said it was Schumer who had suggested renaming Penn Station after the president – a claim that the New York Democrat quickly denied as an “absolute lie”. On 10 February, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, contradicted Trump’s account when she responded to a question about whether her boss had asked Schumer for help renaming the train station and airport. “About the renaming, why not? It was something the president floated in his conversation with Chuck Schumer,” Leavitt said.

In October, at the start of last year’s 43-day US government shutdown, the Trump administration announced it would withhold funds for the sprawling infrastructure program, known as the Gateway project, until it concluded a review into whether diversity practices had played a role in selecting the project’s contractors. But in a statement last month, the administration shifted its argument for suspending the funds, saying it was because Schumer and other Democrats had refused to negotiate with Trump, especially on immigration policies. “There is nothing stopping Democrats from prioritizing the interests of Americans over illegal aliens and getting this project back on track,” said a White House spokesperson, Kush Desai.

The administration’s changing rhetoric – railing about diversity and “illegal aliens” – is ultimately a bureaucratic weaponization of culture war grievances to mask a presidential shakedown. On 6 February, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to release overdue payments for the project while a lawsuit by state officials in New York and New Jersey winds its way through the courts. By 18 February, the administration had released $205m in federal funds owed to the project since it withheld funding in October. Construction work on the Gateway tunnel could resume next week, after it was stopped earlier this month because funds had run out. But the US transportation department has appealed the judge’s order, and it could freeze payments once again if other courts rule in its favor.

For now, Trump has failed to use the cudgel of federal funding to expand his presidential branding opportunity. But he’s still eager to satiate his impulse as a real estate mogul, trying to use his second term to slap his name on as many monuments, buildings and federal projects as possible. And Republicans in Congress are keen to flatter their leader by plastering his moniker on a range of landmarks. One Republican Congress member last year proposed renaming Dulles airport as “Donald J. Trump International Airport”, while another introduced a bill requiring the National Park Service to add Trump’s face to Mount Rushmore, the monument in South Dakota which features sculptures of the US presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

Trump is also lobbying owners of the NFL’s Washington Commanders team to name their planned $3.7bn stadium after him, and he’s reportedly pressing US government bodies that must approve the project to pave the way for such a tribute when the stadium opens in 2030. (When asked about these reports, Leavitt, the White House press secretary, responded: “That would surely be a beautiful name, as it was President Trump who made the rebuilding of the new stadium possible.”)

No previous US president has tried to put his name on so many buildings or monuments, especially while still in office. Most leaders have waited years or decades for such honors, which are usually initiated by subsequent presidents or legislators. One exception was John F Kennedy, who was memorialized shortly after his assassination in 1963, with a federal building and the Kennedy Space Center named after him. In 1964, Congress renamed a planned national cultural center in Washington in JFK’s honor – and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has served as a “living memorial” to him since it opened in 1971.

In December, Trump’s name was added to the Kennedy Center after a vote by its board of trustees, a majority of whom were appointed by Trump last year, when he purged the board and installed himself as its chair. That decision promoted outrage and a lawsuit by a Democratic lawmaker, arguing that only Congress has the authority to change the institution’s name. If a new US administration, or a Democratic-controlled Congress, takes power, it’s very likely to remove Trump’s name from the center.

The Kennedy Center’s renaming backfired on the president in other ways, with a cascade of high-profile artists and groups declaring that they would cancel performances. On 1 February, Trump abruptly announced that he plans to close the center for two years of renovations, starting in July. It seems Trump decided to avoid the embarrassment of keeping open a cultural institute that now bears his name but fails to attract enough high-level programming.

Many Americans are also getting tired of Trump’s endless self-promotion and narcissism. A CNN poll released last month found that 58% of the US public thinks Trump has “gone too far” in using the power of the presidency. In response to another question about Trump’s “changes to cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian”, 62% of Americans said he had “gone too far” on that as well. But among the most damaging responses was that only 37% of those surveyed said Trump “puts the good of the country above his personal gain” – meaning that nearly two-thirds of respondents think the president is mostly out for himself.

The recent CNN poll, among others, show that Americans are put off by Trump’s brazen attempts to profit from the presidency since he returned to office. But the potential conflicts around Trump’s campaign to enrich himself and his family are complicated, especially as the White House insists Trump has no conflicts of any kind. It’s easier for Americans to see through the hypocrisy of a leader who claims to be addressing deep economic problems while spending a lot of time building – or renaming – monuments to himself.