Donald Trump has long been obsessed with seeing his name in print. He graces his buildings with large, all-caps renditions of his last name, and charges other companies for the presumed privilege of doing the same. He has attached his name not just to real estate, but to bottled water, and mail-order meat, and ties, and hats, and a now-infamous "university" that purported to teach students the Trump way of doing business (hint: it involves charging suckers steep fees for minuscule rewards), and a few other side businesses besides.
But when Donald Trump leaves office, his name will mean something different. Trump now has a new definition as shorthand phrase for racist nationalism; Trump's name is uttered as an uncoded message of hate.
Peppered among these incidents is a phenomenon distinct from the routine racism so familiar in this country: the provocative use of “Trump,” after the man whose comments about Mexicans, Muslims and undocumented immigrants — coupled with his muted responses to white nationalist activity — have proved so inflammatory. His words have also become an accelerant on the playing field of sports, in his public criticism of black athletes he deems to be unpatriotic or ungrateful.
Officials at Salem State University in Massachusetts discovered hateful graffiti spray-painted on benches and a fence surrounding the baseball field, including “Trump #1 Whites Only USA.” [...]
Across the country, students have used the president’s name to mock or goad minority opponents at sporting events. In March, white fans at suburban Canton High School in Connecticut shouted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” as players from Hartford’s Classical Magnet School, which is predominantly black and Latino, took foul shots during a basketball playoff game.
The chant Trump! is not, at a high school basketball game or in countless similar venues, used as expression of partisan support. It is a chant aimed at immigrants, and at Muslims, and at minorities and those only suspected of being minorities. And it is becoming pervasive.
The jarring use of Mr. Trump’s name began to surface shortly after he declared his candidacy in June 2015. Within a year, educators were reporting incidents in which, as the Inside Higher Ed website put it, “Trump” had become “a kind of taunt, tossed by largely white students at minority opponents during, say, basketball games.”
And that is the Trump legacy. His name, used alone, as racial epithet. A chant of Trump! stands for only one thing; it is the equivalent of marchers chanting "blood and soil" or "Jews will not replace us."
The victims later said that the man interspersed his racist epithets with: “Trump, Trump, Trump.” (And yes, the name does tend to come in threes, as if the incantation of his name might summon the man himself.) [...]
“It’s authoritarian, the cult of personality,” Mr. Meacham said. “It’s saying that we’re American — and you’re not.”
That would be a fitting legacy, for the man. For his name to adorn not tall, graceless buildings with overpriced rents, and certainly not airports or highways or some future depressingly-named warship, but to live on mostly as epithets shouted by America's worst people, people who live in constant, daily fear of a society that will someday no longer tolerate their petty attempts at maintaining an American caste system based around their own personal bigotries.
He may yet avoid it, of course. It is not likely that his fans will still be shouting Trump! as an epithet if the term comes to more commonly be associated with outright corruption, or conspiracy, or incompetence. But it is not likely that his name will amount to anything more. Someday, even he may realize that.