Donald Trump is set to have yet another building named after himself, this time just west of his adopted hometown.
“Fifty years from now, when we’re all not in this chamber and maybe not here on this earth, we’re going to look back and recognize what this president, this sitting president, did to save America,” Florida state Senator Danny Burgess said ahead of the GOP-led legislature’s vote to approve changing the name of Palm Beach’s airport to President Donald J. Trump International.
The bill passed Thursday after a 25-11 vote, having passed the Florida House with 81-30 votes Tuesday. It now moves to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office to be signed into law.
“Has a GREAT ring to it,” White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung posted on X shortly after news of the vote broke.
It follows after attorneys raised the alarm earlier this week over revelations the Trump Organization has filed trademark applications for “Donald J. Trump International Airport” and other, similar names.
Trademark lawyer Josh Gerben slammed the move, which comes amid reports the White House is pushing for similar rebrands at New York’s Penn Station and Washington Dulles International Airport, as a “completely unprecedented” cash-grab by the nation’s “grifter-in-chief.”
The MAGA administration has both denied those reports and rejected Gerben’s characterization of the Trump Organization’s trademark applications. “To be clear, the president and his family will not receive any royalty, licensing fee, or financial consideration whatsoever from the proposed airport renaming,” Trump’s lawyer Michael Santucci told USA Today. “The Trump Organization is, and always has been, willing to provide this right to his hometown county at no charge.”
Gerben’s concerns remain, not least given the Trump Organization’s proposed waiver could theoretically be reneged at any time during the remainder of his second term, or once he leaves office.
“The move raises unusual questions about the intersection of public infrastructure and private brand ownership,” he wrote earlier this week. “While presidents and public officials have had landmarks named in their honor, a sitting president’s private company has never in the history of the United States sought trademark rights in advance of such naming.”
Palm Beach Airport is only the latest building to undergo a wholesale MAGA rebrand. Others include D.C.’s Kennedy Center, now the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Institute of Peace building, now the Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace.
Critics have been quick to note the Kennedy Center’s new title has the unfortunate and presumably unintended consequence of implying the president, otherwise very much alive, has died. It remains officially registered under its former name according to federal law.
Changes to the Institute of Peace building also come as the president stands accused of unprecedented attacks on the rules-based international order, most notably with his lightning invasion of Venezuela earlier in January and threats of annexing Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.
Trump himself wrote in a letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister earlier this year, at the very height of his threats against the vast Arctic island, that because the Nobel Committee declined to award him last year’s Peace Prize, he no longer feels “an obligation to think purely of peace.”
The Norwegian government is unaffiliated with the Nobel Committee. It has no influence over whom the independent panel chooses to grant the organization’s coveted honors.
The president further used the Institute of Peace building Wednesday to host the inaugural meeting of his new Board of Peace initiative. Not a single European ally attended the summit, with the new organization, intended as a MAGAfied corollary to the United Nations, instead largely populated by representatives from authoritarian regimes like Azerbaijan, Belarus, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
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