What A Day - Trump’s Obsession With Trump

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

In the last year and a half, President Donald Trump has put his name, image, or both, on a whole host of things — federal buildings, passports, the resident National Park pass, the administration��s child savings accounts, the under construction border wall, and of course, the Kennedy Center. But why? Why is Trump so obsessed with seeing his name on pretty much everything that isn’t nailed down (and a lot that is)? To find out, we spoke with Alex Wagner, host of Crooked Media’s Runaway Country.And in headlines, the Iran war hits the six-month mark, Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh suggests the central bank may have to raise interest rates, Trump announces a U.S. Space Academy, and Trump plans to send Vice President JD Vance to Ground Zero for the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.Show Notes: Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

At the end of the day, it really is all about him. And he wants to make sure that the city in which he lives, the nation's capital, and to some degree the nation itself reflects that. I'm Jane Koston, and this is Waddeh, the show that appreciates former South Carolina Republican representative, current Fox News pundit and hair gel enthusiast, Trey Gowdy, for focusing on the real issues at play with President Donald Trump's renaming of Lake Ontario. Here's what troubles me. So it took me 12 years.

to remember that acronym to learn the Great Lakes. It's Holmes, right? Oh. All right. The O changes to A. That's close to Hamas. That's what bothers me about changing the name from Ontario to America is how close that acronym is to Hamas.

Yes, Trey. That's the problem here. Also, 12 years? Okay. On today's show, we talk about Trump's naming obsession with Runaway Countries, Alex Wagner. Before we climb into the Donald J. Trump morass of bad ideas, here's what we're following today, Friday, August 28th.

You just said it is a little excursion and you said it is a war. So which one is it? Well, it's both. It's both. It's an excursion that will keep us out of a war. And the war is going to be, I mean, for them it's a war. For us, it's turned out to be easier that we thought. Well, this is awkward. That was Trump in March, selling lies to the American people about his war of choice against Iran. Or should I say, excursion? Let's fast forward. We're now six months in, and there's no end in sight.

In fact, I'd argue we're worse off than before. 18 American service members have been killed. Oil prices have skyrocketed, and Iran is more emboldened than ever. What's more, negotiations between the U.S. and Iran are going nowhere. Officials in the region have been trying to get the two countries to talk again, but Iran remains infuriated that the U.S. tried to enact, quote, economic deeday on the country with fresh sanctions. And on top of all that, the war has already cost the U.S. more than $37.5 billion.

Thanks, Trump. We must be confident that underlying inflation is moving to our objective, clearly and at sufficient speed. Otherwise, we have work to do. That's our job. that's our mandate, and that's our charge to keep. Oh, so all Fed chairs sound like that. Got it.

Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh gave his first high-profile speech at the Fed's annual conference in Wyoming today. Warsh said inflation is still too high and suggested that the central bank may have to raise interest rates in the coming months to bring it down. Hmm. This sounds oddly familiar. Warsh acknowledged that recent U.S. data shows inflation is cooled, but said, quote, they do not tell me that underlying trope that underlying

trends have meaningfully improved. The Fed meets in September. A nation cannot be first on Earth if we're going to be second in space, just not going to happen. Somehow it just doesn't work that way. It makes sense. I was going to say, does it make sense? Yeah, I guess it does when you think about it. No, it doesn't make sense. Not even a little bit. Trump spoke at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston today and honored the Artemis 2 NASA crew for their mission around the moon earlier this year. While he was gabbing, Trump announced that he's creating a U.S. Space Academy to train

future generations for ambitious space missions. So you think of West Point and you think of Annapolis and you think of the Air Force Academy and you think of the Coast Guard Academy is great. They're all great. But we're going to have now a space force. We're going to have an academy for what the people in this room love the most. Seriously, because how could you? would be first on earth if we're second in space.

Trump is not planning to attend the New York City ceremony for the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, partly because they won't let him give a speech, the New York Times reports. It's not about Trump. The ceremony has barred remarks from politicians since 2012, wanting to focus on the victims and survivors of the attacks and avoid a partisanship, which is tough for Trump, who loves partisanship. And there's another consideration, golf.

Trump will be leaving for Ireland. on September 12th to attend the Irish Open tournament at his golf club and Dunebeg. As the Times also noted, leaving the U.S. from one of the regional airports in New York or New Jersey would cause far more logistical headaches than leaving from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.

And obviously, Trump simply cannot just, you know, not go to a golf tournament. Instead, Trump plans to commemorate the anniversary at the Pentagon and send a vice president J.D. Vance to Ground Zero. And that's the news. Let's talk about Trump, specifically his obsession with naming things. This week, Trump decided that Lake Ontario should be renamed Lake America.

He made this declaration in the midst of a very dumb trade war with Canada, a country which he has decided is our biggest enemy. Apparently, the idea is that by renaming the lake via executive order, Trump will annoy the Canadian government so much that they'll give in on tariffs? Even though the renaming carries no actual significance outside of, U.S. government maps? Seriously, that's the argument Georgia Republican representative, Rich McCormick, made on Fox business today. President Trump is very good at leverage. He wants to do things to irritate people who he's negotiating with so he can get a better deal. Quick question.

What? Of course, Trump renaming things isn't a negotiation strategy. It's an ethos. And there's nothing Trump likes to name things after more than himself. As the Atlantic reported earlier this month, Trump has put his name, image, or both, on federal buildings, passports, the resident national park pass, the administration's child savings accounts, the under-construction border wall, the Kennedy Center, and much, much more. But why? Why is Trump so obsessed with seeing his name on pretty much everything that isn't nailed down and a lot that is? To find out, I talked to Alex Wagner. She's the host of crooked media's runaway country. Alex, welcome back to what a day. Jane, I'm so thrilled to be here, always.

So Trump and the Kennedy Center made headlines again this week because I guess he's bored. After DOJ lawyers indicated the building could be torn down if Trump's renovation and, importantly, name edition isn't approved. It's very mob boss, like nice Kennedy Center you've got here, shame if something happens to it. What is up with Trump's obsession with the Kennedy Center? Well, I think this dovetails with his broader obsession with monuments to himself. Right. which is also giving real small dick energy. I'm allowed to say that on this podcast, right?

I'm fine with it. The deep concern this man has about his ego, about, you know, the need to burnish his ego, his legacy, I guess. It suggests to me that he understands how hated he is, that he needs to erect statues, monuments, and rename cultural centers because no one else will. But it also may just be the most. literal expression of the malignant monstrous narcissism that I think really directs every choice Trump makes.

You know, I mean, I just at the end of the day, it really is all about him. And he wants to make sure that the city in which he lives, the nation's capital, and to some degree the nation itself reflects that, which is why the Treasury is minting $1 Trump coins. The Kennedy Center could be called whatever, something related to Trump, the plaza in front of it, the arc to triumph, Trump, Trumpomph. Like, all of it is just, he wants to be seen as a great man of history. And we know this from reporting at the Atlantic. Like, he is obsessed with being seen as one of humankind's great leaders along, you know, along the lines of Alexander

the Great and Bonaparte and, I don't know, Caligula. No, not Caligula. But you get the, you get what I'm saying. I appreciate a good Caligula reference. But a judge ordered Trump to remove his name from the Kennedy Center. The Senator's board wants to add an in inscription with Trump's name, the whole thing is back in court. But my question to you is, Alex, I am of two minds of something. On the one hand, I know Donald Trump, like many business people, believes in kind of the art of magical thinking. If you say something about yourself enough times, everyone will believe it. You know, if you say, like, I'm a great businessman. I am very, very wealthy. Other people believe it. But it seems to me now that Trump believes this,

too. You made the point that Trump wants to put his name on everything because no one else will do it. But my thought is I think Trump actually thinks this is what people want. He's surrounded by people who tell him that, you know, people named Natalie who tell him that everything he does is great. He firmly believes that he will be able to pick a successor who will obviously win the next presidential election in 2028 because he's so awesome. So like what's going on here? Like is it that Trump knows that if he doesn't name everything after him, no one else is going to name anything after him. Or does he think that everyone wants this? I think he believes that he can revise history.

I mean, remember this is the person that launched the Barack Obama wasn't born in this country, racist. The birther as a movement owes a great deal of credit to Donald Trump. and he sees the sort of fruits of these efforts play out as he wants them to. I mean, there's a subsection of the American public that believes that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. And so Trump, I think, understands facts and reality to be quite malleable. And so if he erects monuments, which are, you know, or renames centers after himself or mince coins after himself, he can force history to see him as a great precedent. I mean, I just genuinely think, his reality distortion field is big enough to encompass, like, everything. And why shouldn't he? And by the way, we in America are pretty good at whitewashing the terrible, bad legacy of our founding fathers. Like, Andrew Jackson is still on currency, like the architect of the genocide against

indigenous people, slave owners. We never mentioned the fact that half of our founding fathers were slave owners. You know, we are very good at covering up. indiscretion and sin. And so why shouldn't Donald Trump believe that he can manipulate the story to make him a great man? Why can't, you know, he has many reasons to believe that these efforts will bear fruit, whether it's because he thinks he might otherwise be written about poorly or just because he thinks he can manipulate things and why not. I'm not sure. But I do think, you know, so far, he hasn't been proven wrong. Like, I think that it's entirely possible that in 50 years,

The MAGA movement may be called something else, but it will still champion Donald Trump in the same way that you have, like, you know, lost causers down south who are like the Sibis of War of Northern Aggression. Like, we rewrite history constantly in favor of the worst. So why couldn't that work in Donald Trump's favor? If you also find that thought incredibly depressing, stick around. I promise it gets better. We'll get back to my conversation with Alex Wagner in a moment. In the meantime, leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. What Today is brought to you by Zbiotics. If I'm going out and I'm going to have drinks,

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we've been under the existential threat of nuclear warfare. But it doesn't have to be this way. The Back from the Brink podcast debunks the myth that nuclear weapons keep us safe and were stuck with them forever. The Back from the Brink podcast shows us how we can get rid of these weapons and what everyday people can do. Find it online at preventnuclearwar.org slash podcast or search for the Back from the Brink podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get back to my conversation with Alex Wagner. You know, you mentioned that the Kennedy Center is just one of many, many, many, many things Trump wants to add his name to. But I think about, so I'm from Ohio, southern Ohio, Cincinnati.

And there is a highway that goes, I believe, east to west in Cincinnati. And it was renamed in honor of Ronald Reagan. My late mother hated Ronald Reagan with a fiery passion and never referred to. that highway as Ronald Reagan highway. She always referred to it as Cross County. It was just like, that's just we don't call it that. And I keep thinking about how like, no matter what Trump puts, you know, he could rename any number of things, but there will be a large swath of the country that just doesn't go along with it. So what does that do to us as Americans when you have a president who tries to claim all of our national treasures as his own, but then you also have millions of

Americans who just will never call it that. They will, we will never call it Kennedy Trump Center. We will never, you know, I will never refer to Trump coins. It just seems as if that you will have a swath of people who will pretend or go along with this, and you have a swath of people who will just simply never do it. Like, it seems to be, you are, you know, Trump is making national monuments, dollars, the Kennedy Center, which is a lot. lovely place I've been many times to watch productions of things into things that, like,

you have to make a choice. Are you going to give in or stand tall? Like, what does that do to us? Okay, so without trying to pretend to be John McWhorter, I do think the bastardization of language and names almost exists separately than the erection of monuments, just because there's a question of like, what do you do with the monuments once Trump is out of office, right? Which is a different question than, like, how do you refer to? National Airport or Dulles Airport, if it's renamed Donald Trump Airport, short of renaming it back to what it once was. But Trump has shown us that nothing is permanent. Look at the U.S. Army bases that were unnamed for Confederate like heroes and then renamed for Confederate heroes when Donald Trump

came back into office. He's proven that like everything is negotiable, everything is fungible. And that then further, I think, creates like two realities for America when we're not even using the same language to describe the same places. I mean, I'm with you. I grew up in Washington, D.C. It'll always be national airport for me. I never call it Reagan. And I think you're going to have a host of that, depending on how aggressive Trump is with this renaming effort. Like people who will never call Palm Beach Airport, Donald J. Trump Airport, people who will never call it the Kennedy Trump Center. And that leaves us at a crossroads, right? Like one of the, I think, most terrifying aspects of this period is the way in which we just refer to reality in different ways. Like,

January 6th is for half the country a day of riot and insurrection. And for the other half of the country, it's something distinctly different. And when that bifurcation can, I mean, I don't want to get too academic here, but that chip is sailed. But when that bifurcation extends to language itself, then, like, how do you, you can't agree on the facts or even the words used to describe them. And that, to me, is, like, really treacherous. And one of the many, many evils that Trump has let out of the Pandora's box is like how we sort of reconcile how we describe things in the years after Trump. I mean, I think it's actually going to be a huge problem for us. So we know that Trump has dictatorial impulses, and this is one of them.

The great Zach Beecham, who writes for Vox, he pointed out that the former dictator of Turkmenistan renamed the days of the week and the months of the year, I believe, after him and his mother. And they relatively recently, after he died, was like, okay, we're going to go back to not that. But this seems so, such dictatorial small ball. Like, is this, you know, we talked about his obsession with his legacy, this kind of dictatorial mindset.

But to me, it also kind of shows he's an 80-year-old man with a really ridiculous fixation. Like, there's a way to be a dictator, but this is like, if you're a dictator, but the only thing you can dictate is that a certain group of people is going to refer to a building in a way that you like. What do you think this says about where Trump is right now, where he is a president who is 80 years old, who has a roughly between a 32 and 38 percent approval rating and is facing losing control of Congress and has a party where you're already starting to see Trump endorsed candidates in states like Kentucky removing Trump language from their websites

It's because they want to win. Like, what does it say about where we are now with him? Well, I think he's grossly unpopular. But I am old enough to understand the way in which legacies get whitewashed. And I don't mean just like from, you know, the reconstruction era. But like, everything's relative, right? There are a whole bunch of people that protested the Iraq War and really didn't like George W. Bush. And now are like, I'd take that painter in a heartbeat.

I'd swap them out for Trump in a second, right? Like, we are very good at forgetting the sins of the past. And that's what I worry about with all this. ego burnishing for Trump. It seems insane now, but I do worry that like in 20, 30 years, there are going to be people who are like, he was a great president. Remember, he fast-tracked the COVID vaccine? And he was so good for the economy. I mean, like, people just fucking forget that he was in office even in 2020 when COVID first broke out and he mismanaged and caused mass death across the country. Like, we, our memory is so short term. So yes, like,

these all seem stupid and petty. And overall, I mean, I think we know. We know. our heart of hearts that he has been a terrible president, probably the worst in history. I think the fact that he is preoccupied with hot glue gunning gold coins to the walls of the Oval Office tells you that the man is clearly addled and not fit for office, but like that's for, I suppose, cabinet secretaries to decide and not me. His main interest right now, as it always has been, but it is expressed more fully and quite literally in these days, is himself. And like the management of his name and his image and his brand. And that's literally all he's focused on, which is why our response to this idiotic trade war with Canada was for Trump to rename Lake Ontario, Lake America. I mean,

it's all just surface level, like, petty bullshit. That's, that is the operating standpoint of this administration, like the most cursory, idiotic, stupid, petty, like strategy is the one that they will pursue. I will only say one thing, though, Jane, on the naming stuff after yourself, thing, there is probably a lesson to learn because if you think about something like Obamacare, right, which was a dig initially, right? Like a real insult. We're going to call the ACA Obamacare because he's going to have to own it. Well, now, everybody just calls it Obamacare.

Everybody fucking loves Obamacare. Like, it's a good thing that it's called Obamacare. And there is probably Democrats and the left can learn something from really taking ownership of good shit that they do. And Trump, you know, he is like the Trump accounts. and he has Trump, RX, prescriptions, and all the rest. Like, they understand, like, people are, you know, we're like lemmings. Like, we need very literal directions.

And if you name something that you're proud of after yourself, that's probably a good way to take credit for it. So maybe a little less, like, monomaniacal focus on the ego, but a little bit more on taking credit for the good shit is where the left should take note from the strategy. Yes, I agree. That's why I'm going to rename this podcast. Jane Koston, what a day. Jane Koston says what a day.

Jane Koston contemplates what a day it has been. Alex, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me, Jane. What a day, Jane Kudson. That was my conversation with Alex Wagner, host of Crooked Media's runaway country. Before we go, two of votesave America's crooked dozen have already left the race for Congress. The whole point of the crooked dozen is to go off to the most beatable Republican incumbents and flip their seats. Andy Ogles in Tennessee lost his primary in a big upset, and Chuck Edwards

in North Carolina has resigned after sexual harassment allegations. Now, Votes of America needs your help, deciding who to add to the lineup next. Visit Votesave America on Instagram to learn more and decide which Republican you want to see added to the Crooked Dozen. Learn how to get involved and defeat the crooked dozen at Votesiveamerica.com. This message has been paid for by Votes of America. Learn more at Votes of America.com. It is not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review,

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