How Donald Trump Seizes the Primal Power of Naming

Among the many sources of inspiration that the filmmaker David Lynch acknowledged throughout his career, from Transcendental Meditation to Bob’s Big Boy chocolate milkshakes, one was a creative exercise involving what he called the “ricky board.” Twenty near-identical images or objects are neatly lined up in four rows of five, and each item, or “ricky,” is labelled with its own unique name. For example, Lynch once exhibited a photograph of a ricky-like assortment of dead flies, whose ranks included Harry, Don, Eric, and Sid. And, for a spell in the nineteen-eighties, Lynch kept a proto-ricky group of identical Woody Woodpecker dolls in his office, named Chucko, Buster, Pete, Bob, and Dan. “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.”

Lynch, who died earlier this month, promised that ricky-makers “will be amazed at the different personalities that emerge depending on the names you give.” He summarized the instructions for the ricky board in a short poem, which concludes, “It isn’t tricky / Just name each ricky / Even though they’re all the same / The change comes from the name.”

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.

“We are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,” he declared. “And we will restore the name of a great President, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs.” (The Indigenous Koyukon people of Alaska have long known this mountain as Denali, a name that the U.S. federal government officially recognized in 2015.) 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.

The name at the top of the American-greatness list, of course, has always been the President’s own—he expanded his empire less by building things than by slapping TRUMP all over them. And the flip side of the relentless dissemination of his own name is his diabolical gift for modifying those of others: Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe, Low Energy Jeb, Little Marco. When other candidates struggled to articulate their brand, Trump’s epithets did the job instead.

For Trump, any name can become an instrument by which to exert his will upon our politics. Sometimes this urge is associative, as when he links undocumented immigrants to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.” Sometimes it appears largely aesthetic, as when, in 2020, he suggested that NATO should expand into the Middle East with a new name, NATOME, pronounced na-TOE-me. (“What a beautiful name,” he mused.) Sometimes his intuition seems to be steered by contrarian spite, as it was last year, after President Biden signed a proclamation recognizing the Transgender Day of Visibility. 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.

And, sometimes, Trump’s assumption of naming rights to all that surrounds him serves the conservative goal of leaving things as they are. 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.” 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? What are you going to name it, Chris? Tell me what you’re going to name it.” (Fort Bragg is now Fort Liberty.)

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. In line with Trump’s executive order abolishing diversity programs, his Administration instructed federal employees to snitch to the Office of Personnel Management if they suspect that a colleague’s job title or description has been quietly changed to obscure a commitment to D.E.I. “or similar ideologies.” And federal health agencies temporarily paused external communications after January 20th because of an executive order warning them not to “promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology”—a restriction that makes common parlance such as “pregnant people” verboten. As a result, reviews of cancer-research grants, reports on how to mitigate the spread of bird flu, and other timely matters ground to a halt.

Gordon Cole, the hearing-impaired F.B.I. agent played by Lynch in “Twin Peaks,” once said that those who do not accept trans people must “fix their hearts or die.” According to this framework, the text of the “gender ideology” executive order chooses death—it literally denies the existence of trans people. Even amid the stupefying information overload of Trump’s first week back in office, this is shocking. 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.

To give a thing a name is to make it real and even to decide on its meaning; it’s a godlike and patriarchal power, and, of course, a creative one. Lynch’s artistic vision was so radically singular and so difficult to articulate that we had to come up with a new name—his name—for it. The “Lynchian” universe is as enigmatic and unsettling as it is intensely vivid and palpable, and its moods, motifs, and frequencies have been seeping into the cultural unconscious for more than forty years. Human beings certainly had a sense of the uncanny in everyday life before “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks” entered the canon, but Lynch prompted us to seek out these currents, even to welcome them, and to admire their beauty and terror. Like all of the greatest and most influential artists, he altered how we see, interpret, and describe our world—which is tantamount to shaping the world itself.

Trump, born the same year as Lynch, is, alas for us, our most influential shaper of reality. Our world is, to an extent, whatever he imagines it to be; the Trumpian universe is not adjacent to our own but the one we live in. I’m not sure that his opposition fully understands this. 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. Ten years into the Trump era, our Democratic avatars still feel obligated to signal their impotent superiority to the person who actually runs the place. But perhaps they could learn something from a performer who tells jokes that land. 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.

Last summer, the Democrats briefly succeeded, for once, in defining Trump and his allies, rather than the other way around. “These are weird people on the other side,” Tim Walz, soon to become Kamala Harris’s running mate, said at the end of July. “They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room.” Suddenly, and not according to any consultant-vetted master plan, the Democrats had stumbled on a Dangerous Donald that worked—everyone was calling the Republicans “weird.” But then the campaign seemed to freeze up, or rather to revert to the Democratic mean of focus-group-tested, micro-data-driven caution. Too often, the impression Harris gave was of a person who was trying to remember her lines, and who perhaps did not know what she actually believed or wanted.

An aura of irresolution has also characterized the Party’s muted response to Trump’s explosive return to the Oval Office. The Times reported that “Democratic officials ascribed the party’s hesitation and confusion in part to a lack of clarity from their voters.” In Politico, Democratic advisers expressed an aversion to “endless resistance headlines”; they spoke of avoiding “the old playbook.” But timidity in the guise of strategic discretion is very much the old playbook. Waiting around until someone else figures out what you are supposed to say or stand for is very much the old playbook.

Trump knows what he wants and how to name it. This has rarely been so frighteningly evident as it was in the first week of his second Administration. He may not know why he wants what he wants, and it may have changed by tomorrow. But he knows his audience, and the confidence with which he foists his impulses, desires, and grievances on their world never wavers, and is self-fulfilling. He is, in this sense, a visionary artist. “I’m good at names, right?” he asked reporters back in 2020. The question answers itself: it’s true because he says so. The change comes from the name. ♦