President Donald Trump has a long history of naming things after himself, including Trump Tower, the Trump National Golf Club, the Trump Taj Mahal casino, Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and Trump: The Game. But as he discovered last week, such self-promotion can be legally problematic when it requires congressional approval.
On Friday, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s appointees exceeded their statutory authority when they attached his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The decision was the latest reminder of the president’s tendency to trample the rule of law in his rush to glorify himself.
The Kennedy Center’s Board of Trustees, which is chaired by Trump himself and stacked with his cronies, approved the name change on December 18, and it was immediately reflected in the lettering on the front of the building. The new name was also featured in the center’s website, logo, and emails.
Not so fast, said U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper: Congress had clearly established the Kennedy Center’s name, and only Congress could change it. Trump was predictably perturbed by that assault on his vanity, saying, “Judge Cooper should be ashamed of himself!”
The implication that Trump is familiar with the concept of shame seemed inconsistent with the conduct at issue in that case. And this was by no means the only time that Trump has courted controversy by using his position to quench his thirst for public adulation.
A couple of weeks before Trump slapped his name on the Kennedy Center, the State Department announced that the U.S. Institute of Peace, a think tank that Congress established in 1984, had been renamed to honor “the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.” That change, which likewise was reflected on the front of the building, was similarly hard to reconcile with federal law.
Trump also has lent his name to a new class of battleships. But unlike the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace, those vessels have not been built yet and may never be funded by Congress.
The “Trump Gold Card” seems even iffier. That program, which Trump purported to authorize in September, is supposed to lure foreign investors by giving them permanent resident status in exchange for a “contribution” of $1 million to the U.S. Treasury. But because Congress has not approved any such program, the legal rationale for it requires rewriting the statutory criteria for EB-1 and EB-2 visas, which hinge on qualifications distinct from sheer wealth.
The Trump administration nevertheless created a website that offers a place in line to wealthy would-be immigrants who fork over a $15,000 “processing fee.” But given the program’s dubious legality, that promise seems just as phony as the outsized mockup of the Trump Gold Card that the president displayed in the Oval Office last fall, which featured the Statue of Liberty, a bald eagle, a head shot of Trump, and his signature.
Trump’s face and signature are also central elements of the “commemorative U.S. passports” that the State Department plans to start issuing soon, ostensibly in honor of the nation’s 250th birthday. Trump’s signature, but not his face, will appear on American currency too, occupying the spot usually reserved for the U.S. treasurer—a revision that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent describes as a “powerful way to recognize the historic achievements of our great country and President Donald J. Trump.”
Both of those tributes are unprecedented but legal. The same cannot be said of the fanciful plan to create a $250 bill featuring Trump’s picture, which would violate federal law in two ways: by honoring a living person and by creating a new denomination.
Last year, Rep. Joe Wilson (R–S.C.) introduced a bill that would have eliminated those obstacles and required the Treasury Department to “commemorate the semiquincentennial of the United States” by producing the Trump bills. But that legislation went nowhere, underlining a point that Trump already understood: Doing things the legal way is hard.
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