How Donald Trump Seizes the Primal Power of Naming

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

69% : Trump, born the same year as Lynch, is, alas for us, our most influential shaper of reality.
63% : Trump knows what he wants and how to name it.
60% : "On what would have been Lynch's seventy-ninth birthday, on January 20th, Donald Trump delivered his second Inaugural Address from the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, and, although we will likely never see the Trump version of a ricky board -- twenty Big Macs, twenty cans of Diet Coke, twenty photographs of Miss Universe 2013 -- the President's speech evinced his instinctive grasp of the power that he can assert and accrete to himself through acts of naming and renaming.
60% : For Trump, any name can become an instrument by which to exert his will upon our politics.
53% : Last summer, the Democrats briefly succeeded, for once, in defining Trump and his allies, rather than the other way around.
51% : Trump codified these promises in an executive order titled "Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness" -- one of an avalanche of such orders that he signed immediately after his Inauguration, and which included ordering troops to the southern border, suspending admissions of refugees, ending birthright citizenship, expanding oil drilling in Alaska, pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, and pardoning the January 6th rioters.
49% : "They were my dear friends for a while but certain traits started coming out and they became not so nice," Lynch later said of the woodpeckers, adding, "They are not in my life anymore.
49% : For Trump, it is also extremely on-brand, given that transphobia is so often expressed by the refusal to call another person by their name.
41% : It happened to fall on Easter, and Trump quipped that Election Day itself should be renamed: "Let's call it Christian Visibility Day," he told a crowd at a Wisconsin rally.
41% : During the Inaugural Address, when Trump announced the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, Hillary Clinton, seated in the audience behind him, laughed in a conspicuous way, her shoulders jiggling.
39% : In a Fox News interview with Chris Wallace, Trump asked, referring to Fort Bragg, "We're going to name it after the Reverend Al Sharpton?
33% : Case in point: during the 2016 campaign, Clinton and the Democratic National Committee coördinated a brief attempt to rename Trump, via press release, as Dangerous Donald, which managed both to reinforce her image as a phony and to make him sound kind of cool.
29% : It's ironic that Democrats are caricatured as being tortured by semantics and censorious of nomenclature -- pronouns, "Latinx," and so forth -- when Trump is just as deeply and openly invested in such matters.
28% : Close to the end of his first term, Trump objected to proposals to change the names of U.S. military bases honoring Confederate leaders, announcing on Twitter that his "Administration will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations."

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