Trump eying one of DC's most sacred sites for a self-promoting rebrand: MS NOW
Administration officials have reportedly discussed adding President Donald Trump's name to the site of one the greatest tragedies and a major turning point in American history.
MS NOW reported Wednesday that officials are circulating a list of government properties that could carry Trump's name in some form, while the president fights to add his name to the Kennedy Center, and one of those sites is Ford's Theatre, the Washington playhouse where Abraham Lincoln was fatally shot in 1865.
Sources familiar with the effort said the theater has come up in those discussions, although it remains unclear how seriously it is being considered or what form any tribute would take. One administration official confirmed the idea had been discussed but did not know where it stood.
The White House and the Interior Department both rejected the report. "This story is completely false," White House spokesman Davis Ingle said. An Interior Department spokesperson said: "This is not true."
A former administration official told MS NOW that aides and allies pitch naming ideas to win the 80-year-old president's favor, and that person summed up Trump's attitude this way: "Why would I say no? Everybody's trying to please me."
"They know flattery gets them everything," the former official added.
One person with knowledge of the broader effort said officials are looking for sites that would pose fewer legal hurdles than the Kennedy Center fight – but Ford's Theatre may not be one of them.
Its name, and that of the Petersen House where Lincoln died, is set by the Nixon-era federal law that created Ford's Theatre National Historic Site, so a formal change would likely need approval from Congress, but the administration has pushed ahead with renamings anyway – the changes at the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace both drew lawsuits.
Trump has lauded the site before. “What a place,” Trump said in a June 2019 gala speech there, before he turned toward the box where Lincoln was shot and said, "That's history at its highest."
The president has left his mark across the capital in his second term. His face appears on passports and on banners hung over federal agencies, the East Wing was demolished for his ballroom, and plans are moving ahead for a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery.
Officials have also reportedly discussed putting his name on Dulles International Airport, Penn Station and the Commanders' new stadium, although Trump has denied pursuing the Penn Station renaming.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a bill in January that would bar naming federal property after sitting presidents. It has not advanced.
The theater is currently staging “Come From Away,” a musical about the Canadian town that welcomed thousands of passengers whose flights were grounded after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as part of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.