The futility of Trump’s grandiose personal branding of public assets, from ballrooms and bills to ships and planes

In a relentless, unprecedented branding exercise, the sheer volume of entities now bearing the name of President Donald Trump strains credulity. We now live in a world of Trump RX and Trump accounts, of Trump coins and Trump fighter jets. We have seen the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts slapped with his name, the Institute of Peace renamed after him, the christening of the President Donald J. Trump International Airport in Palm Beach, a new fleet of guided-missile warships designated as Trump-class destroyers, the Trump Gold Card visa for wealthy immigrants, and even the unprecedented stamp of his signature on U.S. paper currency, something reserved beforehand only for the Treasury Secretary.

Of course, that doesn’t even factor in the graveyard of branded detritus across Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Ice bottled water, Trump Airlines, Trump Mortgage, Trump Fragrances, Trump Board Games, Trump Bibles, the infamous Trump University, and many more.

As we write about in our best-selling new book, Trump’s Ten Commandments — the first assessment of the arc of Trump’s career by leadership scholars — his grandiose image building is a key leadership lever of the supposed master of the deal. Published by Worth/Simon & Schuster, our book makes clear how the outer-borough arriviste from Queens was never truly accepted by the Manhattan aristocracy, so he reacted by plastering his name all over New York City in giant letters, putting gold leaf where others would put wood or stone, creating a visual vocabulary of success that regular people could easily and immediately understand. He is obsessed with gold, because gold screams money to the masses. This has always been his entire shtick: class for the masses. He democratizes the performance of luxury in a comically over-the-top, exaggeratedly accessible way. He offers middle-class tourists the chance to walk through Trump Tower’s golden atrium, to bask in a glow that feels like royalty.

This splashy indulgence was labeled a century ago as “conspicuous consumption” by the economist........

© Fortune