Before becoming president, his name brands included Trump: The Board Game, Trump Magazine, and Trump Steaks.
What the bill does
Democratic legislation in Congress would prevent any federal “asset” – such as a federal building, department, or military base – from being named after a sitting president.
The House version, the Federal Property Integrity Act, was introduced on December 23 by Rep. April McClain Delaney (D-MD6).
The Senate version, the SERVE Act, was introduced a few weeks later on January 13 by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
The acronym SERVE stands for Stop Executive Renaming for Vanity and Ego.
Context: the news
President Donald Trump has recently named (or renamed) a number of things after himself, including the Kennedy Center, the U.S. Institute of Peace, a “Trump-class” line of new Navy battleships, and a new form of savings account called Trump Accounts.
Some of these changes were arguably not made by Trump himself. For example, the Kennedy Center was technically renamed by its Board of Directors. Trump, for what it’s worth, claimed he was “surprised” by the renaming.
However, Trump himself had referred to the building as the “Trump Kennedy Center” in remarks earlier that same month, plus Trump appointed all of the board’s current voting members. (The board also consists of some ceremonial “ex officio” members who weren’t appointed by Trump, but who also don’t actually vote.)
Some of the renamings are of dubious legality. The “Trump Kennedy Center” seems to contradict a 1964 congressional law establishing a Kennedy-only name. Similarly, the name “U.S. Institute of Peace” was established by a 1984 congressional law.
In September, The Fulcrum covered the MEGA (Make Entertainment Great Again Act), a Republican congressional bill to legislatively add Trump to the Kennedy Center’s name, which would be of more certain legality. However, the bill has not received a committee vote – and, indeed, has yet to attract a single cosponsor, not even any fellow Republicans.
Context: recent history
Plenty of other federal assets are named for presidents, often while they were still living, but generally only once they were ex-presidents. Some examples from recent decades:
- In 2013, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) headquarters was renamed after former President Bill Clinton.
- In 1999, CIA headquarters was renamed after former President George H.W. Bush.
- In 1998, Washington National Airport was renamed after former President Ronald Reagan. (The airport is technically owned by the federal government, though they’ve leased its operations to an independent authority through 2067.)
Has this happened before?
For a presidential administration to essentially name something after the sitting president himself, though, is a different story. Although it has happened before… kind of.
The city of Washington, D.C. was named during George Washington’s presidency in 1791, by the three commissioners tasked with overseeing the new capital’s development. Washington himself did appoint all three commissioners, though it seems doubtful that they renamed the city at Washington’s behest, as the Trump renamings have apparently been.
Indeed, Washington himself avoided using that name in his official correspondence, instead referring to it as “the federal city.”
The Hoover Dam was named during Herbert Hoover’s presidency, but by Interior Secretary Ray Lyman Wilbur. That example might be more comparable to the current Trump situation, though, since Hoover himself apparently desired the name.
While its name was changed to the Boulder Dam in 1933, by Hoover’s political opponents, President Harry Truman signed a 1947 resolution renaming it the Hoover Dam once again. Hoover wrote Truman that he was “deeply grateful” for Truman rescinding the prior “disgraceful action.”
What supporters say
The current legislation’s Democrat supporters argue that America’s leader shouldn’t be able to name anything after themself, at least not while they’re the incumbent.
"Congress must stop the 'Trump branding' of our national treasures and memorials," Rep. McClain Delaney said in a press release. "My bill will ensure that no other federal landmark can ever be named in honor of a sitting president. It's past time that lawmakers drew a firm line to prevent these types of activities."
“Naming public buildings after himself [is] something that dictators have done throughout history,” Sen. Sanders said in a separate press release. “For Trump to put his name on federal buildings is arrogant and it is illegal. We must put an end to this narcissism — and that’s what this bill does.”
What opponents say
Opponents counter that Trump deserves all these renamings, based on his actions in office.
The Kennedy Center name change reflects “the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building, not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also financially and its reputation,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X, formerly Twitter.
“President Trump will be remembered by history as the President of Peace,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X, formerly Twitter. “It's time our State Department display that” by renaming the U.S. Institute of Peace.
(Trump claims to have ended eight wars, though an Associated Press fact-check disputed that number. 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner and Venezuelan activist Maria Corina Machado gave her award to Trump in January. The Nobel Foundation clarified that though the physical prize can be transferred, the actual honoree is always considered the official winner.)
What happens now
The House version of the legislation has attracted nine Democratic cosponsors. It’s been referred to three House committees: Transportation and Infrastructure, Natural Resources, Oversight and Government Reform.
The Senate version has attracted an identical nine Democratic cosponsors. It’s been referred to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
With odds of passage low in the current Republican-controlled Congress, Democratic lawsuits might be the more likely path to success instead.
In December, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH3) sued the administration to reverse the Kennedy Center’s renaming, claiming it was illegal since only Congress can do so. As of this writing, no oral arguments have been scheduled for the case, nor has any court issued a decision.
Similar legislation
A few other Democratic bills would implement comparable policies.
Kennedy Center Protection Act
Rep. McClain Delaney, lead House sponsor of the aforementioned bill to erase all federal asset renamings after Trump, also introduced the Kennedy Center Protection Act to rename that specific one.
“The Kennedy Center is a memorial to a fallen president,” Rep. McClain Delaney said in a press release. “Changing the name of the Kennedy Center is a betrayal of President Kennedy’s legacy and an affront to the American people and our shared history.”
The bill has attracted 10 Democratic cosponsors and has been referred to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
No Glory for Hate Act
In both the two prior Congresses, Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-CA38) introduced the No Glory for Hate Act to prevent any federal asset from being renamed after a president who was impeached by the House twice – a status which only applies to Trump.
(The Senate acquitted Trump on both impeachments, which is how he was able to remain in office. Two other presidents, Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998, were each impeached once; both were also acquitted.)
“He fueled falsehoods, promoted racism and hatred, and eventually ignited the events of January 6th,” Rep. Sánchez said of Trump in a 2023 press release. “This bill ensures that there is no glory for hate – not a building, statue, or even a park bench."
The bill never received a committee vote, not even in the 2021-22 Congress when Democrats controlled the House. Neither Rep. Sánchez nor any other member appears to have yet introduced the bill in the current Congress – though there’s still nearly a year left.
Jesse Rifkin is a freelance journalist with The Fulcrum. Don’t miss his report, Congress Bill Spotlight, on The Fulcrum. Rifkin’s writings about politics and Congress have been published in the Washington Post, Politico, Roll Call, Los Angeles Times, CNN Opinion, GovTrack, and USA Today.
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Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.