Victor Davis Hanson: Obama Changed Names. Trump Does It, and Suddenly It’s Tyranny.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.  

We’re in another psychodrama, melodrama controversy, and that is that [President] Donald Trump has just renamed Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes, 55% of which is in Canada, 45% in the United States. He said as far as America is concerned, it’s now Lake America. 

People got very angry about that and said it was to pay back Canada because it walked out on a trade agreement, and this is unprecedented. It’s unheard of that he would do that. 

It’s not unheard of. Going back to the Roman age, every time an unpopular emperor died or was executed or was exiled, the Roman puppet Senate issued a damnatio memoriae. That means we’re gonna damn him to memory. And what that meant was all of his images and his name placards all over the empire, 70 million people, a million square miles, were erased. 

They were very economical and practical, the Romans. They didn’t destroy the statue because most people’s bodies were portrayed in sculpture the same. They just wiped out the face and redid it or cut the head off and put a new emperor’s head. But the point was the same. 

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And it happens all over the world today. We call it the Persian Gulf. If you talk to the Arabs on the other side of the gulf, they call it the Arab Gulf. We call it the Rio Grande. I think the Mexicans often call it the Río Bravo. So, each country has a different name. 

But getting back to the issue, did Donald Trump start this? No. He’s only reacting to a long tradition, and a tradition, I might add, that’s been very popular the last 15 years. 

It was Barack Obama who changed Mount McKinley, that had been pretty much there for, oh, over 100 years, and he called it Mount Denali, the Indigenous name. And the state of Alaska had too. Trump changed that back. 

I work at Stanford University. One day I came to the Hoover Tower and I looked around and I thought something was strange about the street sign. I couldn’t quite figure it out. It said Stanford Mall, Stanford Plaza, named after [university co-founder) Jane Stanford. And I thought, it was Serra Mall the last time, named after Junípero Serra. 

It was, but Stanford had voted to take off the word Serra because supposedly this 18th-century Catholic priest who helped build California in some senses as we know it, and as far as when it was under Spanish control, he was integral in offering agriculture, introducing new crops, creating the El Camino Real, basically. And all of a sudden he was considered anti-Indigenous and mean to Indigenous people. 

Of course, it was never symmetrical. We have places in California named Montezuma, athletic teams called the Aztecs. This is a culture that, in some years, what, sacrificed over 50,000 people on the great pyramid at Tenochtitlan in modern Mexico City. 

You go to UC Berkeley. For years people talked about Boalt Hall. Suddenly, Mr. Boalt was considered politically incorrect. He was off. The Earl Warren Legal Institute, named after a Supreme Court justice and former governor of California, just became the Legal Institution. Why? Because Earl Warren signed the deportation of Japanese Americans. 

So, the Left changes names all the time, and yet they get very angry when Donald Trump names the Gulf of America, which, by the way, if you look at the coastline of the Gulf of America and compare it with the coastline of Mexico that borders the gulf on the southern part, it’s about equal. In fact, there may be more American coastline, 1,750 miles versus 1,720 miles on the Mexican side. 

Mexico calls it the Gulf of Mexico. Fine, we have no problem. We call it the Gulf of America. Fine, we have no problem. 

If you’re going to object that Donald Trump names things, then it’s incumbent upon you to say that other presidents don’t do it. It is true that his name is on a lot of things. The co-name of the Kennedy Center now is Donald Trump. 

But the only difference between [Joe] Biden and Obama and Trump is that they had surrogates, committees that renamed things, and a lot of them were liberally appointed, and that’s fine.  

But if you look at the number of schools, the number of streets, the number of geographical places that were named after Obama versus Trump, it’s not even close. 

So, it’s indicative of another artifact, though, and that is we apply a standard to this administration that we never applied to the others, or we never objected to precedents that they established that they thought were fine, but now the result is not what they want, and they want to claim that there was no precedent. 

Think, for example, about the politicization of the attorney general. They said Todd Blanche is too close to Trump. He was his personal lawyer. We forget that Obama’s attorney general was his best friend, Eric Holder, who said, “I am … ” What did he say? “I am Obama’s wingman.” Wingman, as if he was on a military flight mission, protecting the president, not disinterestedly applying justice. 

Same thing with JFK. He appointed Robert Kennedy. Nobody really objected too loudly. They didn’t stop that appointment. 

Another example is Donald Trump took us into an illegal war in Iran. Barack Obama waged an undeclared war on the Afghan-Pakistan border and ordered 500 assassination takeouts with drones destroying targets on the ground. We thought they were mostly terrorists, but maybe they weren’t. There was a lot of collateral damage. There were some, two or three American citizens, that were killed. 

He felt that we should join the French- and British-inspired effort to bomb Muammar Gaddafi, toppling the Gaddafi regime in Libya, and so we never declared war. He never even went to Congress to ask for that authorization. He bombed for seven months. He bombed on the last day in office. 

Nothing really happened. The Gaddafi regime was gonna go anyway. All we did was create a mess that still has not been resolved. 

Bill Clinton thought it was important to stop a genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo, so he decided to bomb the government in Belgrade, the Serbian government under [Slobodan] Milošević, and for 77, 78 days, he didn’t get near Congress. He never asked for authorization, and he bombed and removed, more successfully than Obama had in Libya, a genocide that was taking place, or he stopped it, I should say. 

Finally, we say,”Why does Donald Trump have all these executive orders? It’s just unprecedented. He’s ruling by fiat. He’s a king. We have to have a No Kings march. He’s a tyrant. He’s a dictator. He’s destroyed democracy. He’s ruling by fiat.” 

First of all, most of those executive orders, in a way that we have never seen before, have been challenged deliberately in lower courts. 

Take the new construction on the East Wing of the White House. We’re told that historical groups objected and therefore they were not consulted. They have no statutory right to tell us what to do with the White House. They’re advisory committees. They’re not injured parties. 

There’s enough law on the books, as the Supreme Court found, that the president, whoever he is, has the authority, without consulting Congress, to fix, repair, and even improve the White House as he sees fit. And it’s happened all the time in the past, whether it’s building a swimming pool or taking out the swimming pool and putting in a press room. 

Nobody’s gone to Congress to ask permission, and if they have, they didn’t need to. 

Finally, executive orders. The way to adjudicate whether a president has been excessive in executive orders, because they’ve all served different periods, four years, eight years, sometimes they’ve had their tenures abbreviated, is how many executive orders did they issue on average for each year in office? 

If you look at Donald Trump, it’s quite high. It’s 171. So is it unprecedented? Hardly at all. William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, going back even before Roosevelt, [Warren] Harding, [Calvin] Coolidge, [Herbert] Hoover, all of these presidents used the executive-order facility per year much more than Donald Trump did. 

So just to conclude, I’m not a big fan, and you’re not a big fan, of renaming things. We kind of honor tradition. But when it happens, it’s not an indication, any more than executive orders are, any more than the appointment of an attorney general is, that somehow Donald Trump has broken tradition or protocol and is acting as an uncontrolled autocrat. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. 

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