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Donald Trump’s manic building and naming spree has been a core feature of his second term in office. And that’s saying something. Because if nothing else, you can’t say Trump hasn’t been active. There are wars, blowing up the international trade regime, the on-going attempted authoritarian takeover of the state, the bust-out rush to wrest as much money out of the presidency as he can, his significant role energizing the AI boom (and possible bust). But with all these things, the building and naming spree stands out, especially in 2026. I focus on this today. I return to this today because of news that Trump wants to turn his West Palm Beach golf club into a new Camp David, a permanent presidential retreat.
The details here are important. If Trump had some secluded property he wanted to donate to the federal government for this purpose, there might be some logic, though it’s hard to imagine Democrats wouldn’t put it up for sale at their first opportunity. What he wants to do is different. His plan is to donate a parcel of land at the private club for the Florida Camp David. So it’s really that future presidents would have there own private bungalow at Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach. As an additional, rather comical, sweetener the club’s legal counsel, who is presenting the idea to Palm Beach County officials, says that future presidents will even be offered comped memberships to the club.
In other words, this new gambit seems to combine both Trump’s legacy and pecuniary ambitions, both further embedding himself into the permanent architecture of the presidency and adding a new feature — face time with the president — to his Palm Beach resort.
It’s always been a feature of Trump that he has these odd and glancing moments of candor, like a brief look into the personal quarters of a private railcar as it speeds by. Trump has said a number of times that he has to build monuments to himself because no one else will after he’s gone. This is both a monumentally vain statement and also a bracingly pessimistic, despairing one. Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy didn’t have to worry about this. FDR remains the face on the dime nearing a century after his death. Democrats have long been put off and even repulsed by Republicans’ former mania for naming almost literally everything after Ronald Reagan. But Reagan didn’t do it himself either. Indeed, the most striking thing is that notwithstanding the fact that Trump’s supporters have already tried to name all sort of things after him, he seems to realize or at least anticipate that all of that will melt away as soon as he and the hammer he can bring down on people are gone. However much you hate Trump — and you have so many good reasons! — this is a dark, despairing and fundamentally sad self-conception and effort.
America has no reputational entails. Whatever memories, reputation or sentiments of gratitude that remain after we’re gone are in other peoples’ hands. Over time, they are in the hands of people we never knew, people who never knew us. In a way it is the ultimate trust fall. These are realities we all face and, if we’re lucky, come to terms with as part of coming to grips with our own mortality and eventual deaths, our ultimate loss of ourselves. There are plenty of sobering studies which show that beyond the names of great-grandparents, most ordinary people know little or nothing about these individuals unless the details have been actively written down and preserved. Again, even with great-grandparents, people often know no more than a name.
What adds such pathos, patheticness if you will, is that the naming and building spree can’t really change this. Your monuments can be torn down, as I certainly hope his will. The over-sized metal letters with which federal buildings are named can be pried off as easily and quickly as Trump himself has done. He clearly realizes that he has to get his arch and ballrooms built absolutely as soon as possible or they will simply be cancelled if he’s succeeded by a Democratic president.
I am, I hope it’s clear, not remotely asking you to feel sorry for Donald Trump. But I do want to focus some attention on just how sad a tableau this actually is, in addition to arrogant, grandiose, illegal and all the rest. But fundamentally sad.
A few times I’ve noted that Trump started moving aggressively toward foreign policy and war just as his power and popularity were diminishing at home. That’s when the Greenland fury started, that’s when he went after Venezuela, that’s when, on the sugar high of Venezuela, he launched his catastrophically consequential war on Iran. No one likes unpopularity or flagging power. Trump is unable to handle it. Foreign aggression was a kind of compensating expression of power and dominance, which was possible because an American president’s war power is all but unlimited, a kind of presidential self-soothing. The naming and building campaign kicked off at about the same time and is largely the same thing. It’s an in-spite-of-himself admission that the permanent, almost statutory love he imagined would be his at the outset of the first administration and that he thought he had another shot at in the second will never happen, and he had to start mandating it in construction and name plates that could command it after he’s gone.
