The Trump administration recently removed the Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth holidays from the 2026 schedule of admittance-free days at national parks — and added President Trump’s birthday.
If a single sentence could sum up Donald Trump’s philosophy of life, it’s the one that you just read. Trump is famously inconsistent, frequently contradicting his own policies and tailoring his message to whoever is in front of him, but there’s one thing about him that’s very consistent: He loves to put his name on things. Trump has attached his moniker to office buildings, golf courses, hotels, casinos, apartment buildings, foundations, charities, board games, books, magazines, wineries, airlines, water, vodka, chocolates, energy drinks, steaks, sneakers, “commemorative” coins, and a phony business school. And that’s nowhere near a complete list.
That tendency hasn’t slowed during Trump’s presidency. His company is still making deals for Trump Towers and Trump golf courses, but recently, Trump has begun extending his name-mania to government entities. Last week, for example, Trump announced that the United States Institute of Peace, which was signed into existence by Ronald Reagan, would henceforth be known as the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. This, after summarily removing the organization’s bipartisan board and appointing supporters to take their place. Trump’s name went up on the building one day after the announcement.
In February, Trump fired the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, appointed a board of his acolytes, and was dutifully “elected” chairman. In his remarks last week introducing this year’s Kennedy Center honorees, Trump began referring to the organization as the “Trump Kennedy Center.” You may sense a pattern here.
And lest we forget, in October, Trump bulldozed the East Wing of the White House to make way for a building four times its size, to be named the Donald J. Trump Ballroom. If you think the Trump name won’t be emblazoned in massive letters on that building, you haven’t been paying attention. The White House itself will look like an adjoining cabana.
Trump’s narcissism is an insatiable beast; witness last week’s cabinet meeting, a two-hour-and-17-minute version of “Send in the Clowns,” in which each cabinet member gave a brief rundown of how wonderfully things were going in their department and followed up with loving tongue-caresses of Dear Leader’s brilliance, his impeccable leadership. Trump smiled and smirked … and literally fell asleep several times. In a televised cabinet meeting.
Which brings me to a more delicate matter: Trump’s increasingly obvious mental slippage. We’ve seen this before, and not that long ago. In the spring of 2024, President Joe Biden began screwing up in public — making misstatements, appearing a bit confused on occasion, and looking very frail. Then came that disastrous June debate with Trump, in which a befuddled Biden seemed unable to make a clear response to questions. It was considered one of the worst televised presidential debate performances ever.
The media went nuts. There were countless reports and op-eds about Biden’s mental acuity, about his staff shielding him from public appearances, about his stamina and his ability to serve four more years. It was the biggest story in the country. It got so bad that the Democratic Party hierarchy took action and pressed Biden to pull out of the race, which he did a month later. But the damage was done, and Trump won a second term.
So, little more than a year after Biden’s withdrawal from politics, where are those kinds of stories about Donald Trump? It’s not like the evidence isn’t there. Left without a script, Trump verbally meanders all over the place, his brain skipping from one digression to another, seldom finishing a sentence before jumping to a tangent. He riffs on boat batteries and sharks, on eagles and windmills, on showers that drip, on nonexistent low gas prices, on the eight wars that he’s ended, on drug prices that have fallen “700 percent,” and other ludicrous fantasies. He exaggerates. He lies. He confuses words, messes up names and pronunciations, falls asleep in public, and falls back on simplistic all-or-nothing hyperbole: “Like nothing anyone has ever seen before.” Except, we have, just last year.
Trump is declining before our eyes, becoming an easily manipulated fool, and the press isn’t doing its job. The names of the people propping up Trump won’t appear on any buildings, but they are far more dangerous than he is.