Trump Now Shares One More Thing in Common With History's Worst Dictators

[dalton99a]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/12/trump-kennedy-center-dictators-stalin-franco-yikes.html

Trump Now Shares One More Thing in Common With History’s Worst Dictators
By Paul Finkelman
Dec 20, 2025 10:00 AM

On Thursday, the board of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts voted to rename the center “the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” Weirdly, the board of the center, mostly picked by President Donald Trump, does not seem to understand that a “memorial” center is named for someone who is deceased, and thus the new name implies that Trump is dead. By Friday, Trump’s name was physically added to the building at the behest of his handpicked board. Don’t be fooled by the absurdity of Trump’s vanity and the obsequiousness of these government officials: This is not an at all an innocuous move.

American political culture has long rejected he idea that sitting officer holders, or even living persons, should be honored with buildings or institutions named for them, or have their names and faces on currency, coins, or postage stamps. This sort of behavior is alien to a republic and a democracy. It is common, however, in dictatorships. Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Francisco Franco had heir faces on stamps, currency, and coins during their respective despotic reigns. Josef Stalin appeared on numerous stamps while he was the dictator of the Soviet Union and renamed a major city Stalingrad, after himself. Kim Jong-un sometimes appears on North Korean stamps.

The first United States stamps featured Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, many decades after their deaths. Our coins reflect this tradition as well, with Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Susan B. Anthony, and Sacagawea getting their faces on coinage posthumously. The tyrannical Confederate government, on the other hand, put its leaders on stamps and currency, breaking with the long United States tradition of not honoring living people in these ways.

The traditions around the naming of buildings and institutions in our democracy have been similar. And the names are often the result of nonpolitical, bipartisan decisions. Our nation’s capital was called the District of Columbia until 1802—three years after the death of George Washington—when the city of Washington was chartered. By this time Washington was seen as the “father” of our country, but his political party, the Federalist Party, was no longer in power. The Democratic-Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson supported the name change. Dulles airport in Washington was named for the deceased Republican Secretary of State John Foster Dulles during the Democratic administration of Kennedy. When it opened, there was talk about changing the name, but the Kennedy administration kept it. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was responsible for the creation of New York Municipal Airport, which opened in 1939. Shortly before he died of cancer, and after he was no longer mayor, the city named the airport for him. Similarly, Congress renamed Washington National Airport for Ronald Reagan in 1998, long after Reagan had left politics, and four years after he had announced that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease—and with Democrat Bill Clinton in the White House. O’Hare International Airport in Chicago was named for Edward Henry “Butch” O’Hare, the first Navy pilot to win the Medal of Honor, who died in combat in 1943.

...

[marble falls]

1. Think of it like a preneed funeral package.

[Vogon_Glory]

2. Is Donald John following precedent? Rafael Trujillo, notorious dictator

of the Dominican Republic, also liked to have things named after him.

[dalton99a]

3. +1. The "Little Caesar of the Caribbean" who ordered Haitians murdered on sight.

https://www.thoughtco.com/rafael-trujillo-4687261

Trujillo proceeded to murder and jail his opponents after the election. He also established a paramilitary force, La 42, designed to persecute his opponents and generally instill fear in the population. He exerted full control over the island's economy, establishing monopolies over salt, meat and rice production. He engaged in blatant corruption and conflicts of interest, forcing Dominicans to buy staple food products distributed by his own companies. By rapidly acquiring wealth, Trujillo was eventually able to push out owners across various sectors, such as insurance and tobacco production, forcing them to sell to him.

He also issued propaganda proclaiming himself as the savior of a previously backward country. In 1936 he changed the name of Santo Domingo to Ciudad Trujillo (Trujillo City) and began to erect monuments and dedicate street names to himself.

One of Trujillo's most well-known legacies was his racist attitudes toward Haiti and the Haitian sugarcane laborers who lived near the border. He stoked the historic Dominican prejudice against Black Haitians, advocating a "'deafricanization' of the nation and restoration of 'Catholic values'" (Knight, 225). Despite his own mixed race identity, and the fact that he himself had a Haitian grandparent, he projected the image of the Dominican Republic as a White, Hispanic society, a myth that persists to this day with bigoted, anti-Haitian legislation being passed as recently as 2013.

Trujillo's anti-Haitian sentiment culminated in the murder of an estimated 20,000 Haitians in October 1937, when he traveled to the border and declared that the "Haitian occupation" of the border areas would no longer continue. He ordered all Haitians remaining in the area to be murdered on sight. This act provoked widespread condemnation across Latin America and the U.S. After an investigation, the Dominican government paid Haiti $525,000 "for damages and injuries occasioned by what officially was termed 'frontier conflicts.'" (Moya Pons, 369).

...

https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/parsley-massacre/

A former sugar cane plantation guard, Rafael Trujillo began his ascent to power in the National Guard, where he was trained by American Marines occupying the Dominican Republic. He quickly rose through the ranks, becoming head of the armed forces when the American troops left in 1924, a time of relative prosperity. It was not long before he toppled an aging caretaker president, and in 1930 he began a 31-year dictatorship during which he renamed mountains and cities after himself and embellished his own name with the honorific Great Benefactor of the Nation and Father of the New Dominion. He wore pancake make-up to lighten the traces of color his Haitian grandmother’s blood had left in his skin. Yet Dominican society still snubbed him for his working-class family origins, and for his youthful exploits as a petty thief.

Turmoil in Europe resonated both with the Dominican Republic’s growing economic difficulties and with Trujillo’s own obsessions with race and status. By 1937 the Dominican Republic was practically broke, its sugar exports fetching only a penny a pound, one twentieth of the price during the boom a decade earlier. In late September of that year, weeks before the massacre, the Dominican president publicly accepted a gift of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, whose racial theories he clearly embraced.

Hitler’s ideas gave Trujillo a racist and nationalist plan to distract Dominicans from their empty stomachs. Reminding Dominicans that they could not afford to feed foreigners too, Trujillo cracked down on migration from Haiti. But powerful American sugar cane plantation owners, who brought in Haitians to cut cane because, forced him to make huge exceptions. He resorted to deporting Haitians and tightening border patrols, but the Haitians kept coming. On October 2, 1937, while Trujillo was drunk at a party in his honor not far from the Massacre River, he gave orders for the “solution” to the Haitian problem.

...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Trujillo

In 1936, at the suggestion of Mario Fermín Cabral, the Congress of the Dominican Republic voted overwhelmingly to change the name of the capital from Santo Domingo to Ciudad Trujillo. The province of San Cristóbal was renamed to "Trujillo" and the nation's highest peak, Pico Duarte, to Pico Trujillo. Statues of "El Jefe" were mass-produced and erected across the Dominican Republic, and bridges and public buildings were named in his honor.

The nation's newspapers had praise for Trujillo as part of the front page, and license plates included slogans such as "¡Viva Trujillo!" and "Año del Benefactor de la Patria" (Year of the Benefactor of the Nation). An electric sign was erected in Ciudad Trujillo so that "Dios y Trujillo" could be seen at night as well as in the day. Eventually, even churches were required to post the slogan "Dios en el cielo, Trujillo en la tierra" (God in Heaven, Trujillo on Earth). As time went on, the order of the phrases was reversed (Trujillo on Earth, God in Heaven). Trujillo was recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize by his admirers, but the committee declined the suggestion.[27]

In 1952, under pressure from the Organization of American States, he ceded the presidency to his brother, Héctor. As he was still the de facto leader, Trujillo organized a major national celebration to commemorate 25 years of his rule in 1955. Gold and silver commemorative coins were minted with his image.[30]

Brutal oppression of actual or perceived members of the opposition was the key feature of Trujillo's rule from the very beginning in 1930 when his gang, The 42, led by Miguel Angel Paulino, drove through the streets in their red Packard carro de la muerte ("car of death" ).[31] Trujillo also maintained an execution list of people throughout the world who he felt were his direct enemies or who he felt had wronged him. He even once allowed an opposition party to form and permitted it to operate legally and openly, mainly so that he could identify those who opposed him and arrest or kill them.[32]

...

[Texin]

4. "a "memorial" center is named for someone who is deceased,"

Make it so.

[OnlinePoker]

5. That can be quickly reversed as soon as he's out of the picture.

Most of what can be done by one idiot can be undone by the next, more reasonable occupant of the White House.