If he keeps it up, the only thing that won’t have Donald Trump’s name on it will be Mar-a-Lago.
Lately, President Trump has been in the middle of a vanity-fueled naming binge, slapping his moniker—and what might be the most noxious brand in the world—on anything and everything with room for it.
A growing number of buildings and programs have been defaced with his name: the U.S. Peace Institute. The Kennedy Center. TrumpRx. Trump-class battleships. A Trump Gold Card for wealthy immigrants. He’s floated an “Arc de Trump” in Washington, dangled federal funding if Penn Station and Dulles Airport are renamed after him, and it’s a foregone conclusion that his grotesque addition to the White House will be called the Trump Ballroom.
With three years still to go in his term, it’s not inconceivable that we’ll see the Trump Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Trump at the Alamo, Trump Stadium (take your pick), the Declaration of Trump, the Trump Bill of Rights, and almost certainly Trump on Mount Rushmore.
When he’s finally sentenced and sent to a maximum-security prison, part of a plea bargain might include renaming the penitentiary where he’s housed. Doesn’t Trump Tower at Rikers Island have a ring to it?
This coming December, when world leaders arrive in Miami for the G20, they may be greeted by an obscene 22-foot golden statue—Don Colossus—funded by a group of cryptocurrency investors, including roughly 16 entrepreneurs aiming to promote the “$PATRIOT” meme coin. A gilded monument to Trump’s equally towering ego planted in front of a global summit, sure to be a big, fat blight on the world stage.
There were similarly infamous statues of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, of Muammar Gaddafi in the Bab al-Azizia compound in Tripoli, and of Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang.
But while it’s fun to guess what might get “Trumped” next (and revolting to consider the ugliness that name now screams) there’s an element of failure attached to it all. The Trump brand inevitably does not endure. It collapses.
Where to start? Trump Shuttle. Trump University. Trump Taj Mahal. Trump Plaza. Trump Steaks. Trump Vodka. Trump menswear. Trump fragrances. Over and over again: hype, scandal, lawsuits, failure, and ultimate erasure.
Trump’s name doesn’t last. After he’s ripped someone off, it gets ripped off.
However, there is one place where Trump’s name is plastered everywhere that stands out, because the ink has dried and his name is indelibly attached, more than 3,000 times and counting, in perpetuity: the “Epstein files.”
In any other context, Trump would bark and brag about his name being so ubiquitous. But in this instance, he does not enjoy seeing his name glaring from such a malevolent marquee. Here, it is synonymous with the file bearing the name of the most heinous pedophile and sex trafficker in modern history.
Yet to almost every member of a blinkered GOP Congress and a purblind Justice Department, Trump’s name can hardly be seen at all.
A wave of high-profile figures across law, politics, and culture have resigned or stepped down, after scrutiny tied to the files, underscoring how the revelations have toppled careers from corporate boardrooms to government offices. But Trump, despite a far more extensively documented social relationship with Epstein, remains politically untouched.
For now.
Could the Epstein files be the one thing Trump cannot rename, rebrand, or erase?
Trump’s career has been built on the illusion that his name, when blared loudly enough, conquers reality. When something fails, he rebrands it. When a deal collapses, he blames someone else. When his name becomes toxic, he walks away and leaves the wreckage behind.
Astonishingly, that strategy has worked. For reasons that have nothing to do with Trump’s vaunted “stable genius,” he keeps putting his name on things without consequence from prior failures.
But this time may be different.
Branding only works when the object can be separated from the name. Epstein doesn’t allow that. The record is fixed. The photos exist. The emails abound. The references to that surname recur again and again. No amount of gold plating or marble engraving can change what’s already written down.
Ghislaine Maxwell said on Monday that she could “clear him,” if she received clemency. Trump is transactional, so that offer might tempt him. But the survivors and victims of Epstein’s crimes, and indeed Maxwell’s too, are not. And in the end, they know the truth about Trump, and they can’t be bought, sold or bribed.
So while it may look, for the moment, as though the Trump name will squeak by once again, because it has before, this time may be different. The Trump name is also etched permanently in the minds of the survivors. And they will not be silent.
History suggests Trump’s name usually destroys what it’s attached to. But what happens when the attachment runs the other way, when the name itself becomes the liability?
In 2003, the world watched Saddam Hussein’s statue topple in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, a single image that came to symbolize a collapsing regime. Don Colossus is almost certainly headed for the same fate. Vanity monuments always are.
The real question is whether the Epstein record becomes the one monument to Trump that doesn’t fall, and whether this is the rare instance where Trump’s name brings him down instead of the other way around.
The post Opinion: The One Place Trump Doesn’t Want to See His Name Is Exactly Where It Will Remain appeared first on The Daily Beast.
