Published on
A South Florida airport officially changed its name on Thursday to the President Donald J. Trump International Airport.
Signs for the Palm Beach International Airport have been removed, while new signage goes up.
“Because an entire airport transformation doesn’t happen overnight, you’ll notice a combination of both our classic look and our new brand elements coexisting while traveling through the terminal over the next several weeks,” airport officials said in a Facebook post.
“Trump Force One,” a Boeing 757 owned by The Trump Organisation, was the first plane to arrive at the airport under its new name, shortly after 5 am.
The president’s son, Eric Trump, was one of the passengers. The Trump family regularly uses the West Palm Beach airport when they visit President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in nearby Palm Beach.
A stretch of road from the airport to Trump’s estate was renamed Donald J. Trump Boulevard earlier this year.
“There is no person who has done more for Florida and our country and no one more deserving of this incredible honour,” Eric Trump posted on X.
“As a son, and someone who flies out of this airport nearly every day, I will forever be proud to see the initials ‘DJT’ on my boarding pass.”
While the name change took effect Thursday, the three-letter airport code will change from PBI to DJT on 18 August.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation earlier this year that made the name change possible. Changing the airport’s name is expected to cost as much as $5.5 million (€4.8 million) for new signs, branding and other updates.
Keegan Collett, who was departing the airport on Thursday morning on his way to Cincinnati, said he was surprised to see the new name. He said he doesn’t think Trump deserves to have an airport named after him but isn’t necessarily bothered by it.
“At the end of the day, it’s just the name of an airport,” Collett said. “There’s bigger things. I feel like it’s just more of a distraction. Why even worry about it?”
In Dandridge, Tennessee, on Thursday morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, US Senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty and Representative Tim Burchett attended a ceremony to rename the I-40 Bridge in East Tennessee to the Donald J. Trump Bridge.
Bessent said ahead of the ceremony that “no one is more deserving” of the honour of a bridge renaming than Trump.
Trump received 82% of the vote in Jefferson County, where Dandridge is located, in the 2024 general election.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has taken repeated measures to put his name and image in official spaces, an abrupt break with American political tradition.
Last month, a federal judge rejected a bid by the board of the Kennedy Centre and the Justice Department to halt the removal of President Donald Trump’s name from the performing arts venue.
Judge Christopher Cooper ordered Trump’s name taken off the iconic building in the nation’s capital.
Additional sources • AP