The Board of Trustees—or, if one prefers, the Board of Toadies—at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has renamed it the Trump-Kennedy Center. The 47th president of the United States approves. Trump’s appetite for flattery appears as insatiable as the supply of bootlickers among his followers appears inexhaustible. He also blessed engraving his name on the U.S. Institute of Peace building and delivered a cartographic decree that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be called the Gulf of America.Meanwhile, his secretary of defense, in between haranguing generals about physical fitness and ordering the U.S. Navy to engage in the killing of criminals without trial, has renamed the Department of Defense “the Department of War” (illegally, as it happens). Pete Hegseth has also gone about renaming bases that were once named after Confederate generals (traitors, the lot of them, and for the most part incompetent military leaders) by, last year, named after real heroes. The Hegsethian names are the same as the originals (Bragg, Hood, Lee) but supposedly refer to different people.It is all offensive and in some cases skirts the will, such as it is, of a feeble and craven Congress. It is also puerile. The names will come back. In 10 years’ time, the maps will say “the Gulf of Mexico,” and the odds are good that a Democratic administration will yet again rename the Department of Defense and the forts. Trump’s name will be chiseled out of the walls, as will his embarrassing japes at his predecessors in his “President’s Walk of Fame” at the White House. So why do Trump and his minions do things that are childish in and of themselves, and that anyone with political judgment knows will be undone when their opponents eventually return to power?“Names are powerful,” the exceptional magician Eugene Burger used to like to say, which is why some mentalists begin their acts by memorizing the names of everyone in the audience. The Confederate names on forts built during the early 20th century were designed to consolidate the myth of the Lost Cause, and the nobility of what was, in fact, a sordid struggle for chattel slavery—the worst cause for which men ever fought, as Ulysses S. Grant later noted. And in some measure they succeeded.Names can be tributes too, sometimes of a paradoxical kind. Native Americans were cheated, occasionally massacred, displaced, and defeated by Americans moving West. But in 1973 Jeep named its premier vehicle the Cherokee, hoping to capture ruggedness and pride in the name, even giving the first truck to the then-head of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. The U.S. Army’s most lethal helicopter is the Apache, the Navy’s primarylong-range missile is the Tomahawk, and a century ago William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the most formidable of Civil War generals, bore as his middle name that of one of the greatest of Indian warriors Americans ever encountered.One may debate whether such namings are appropriate—in 2021 the leaders of the Oklahoma-based Cherokee Nation, a different federally recognized tribe, formally objected to having the name on a hulking car—but it is clear that they are intended to serve as a tribute. The renamings carried out by Trump and Hegseth are different. They are akin to the newly positive use of the word swagger and to the photo-shoot cosplay of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem or FBI Director Kash Patel in full tactical combat gear. They are childish.Much of the leadership of the Trump administration, emphatically beginning at the top, exhibits the behavioral patterns of children—broken children, in many cases, who will never really become fully adult and do not understand what adult behavior is.Children, particularly the adolescents whom the Trump leadership cadre most resemble, rarely have a strong sense of futurity. It is one of the reasons they so frequently do stupid things. The knowledge that what we do today may be undone tomorrow, that we cannot control the future to any large degree, that our ability to imprint our wishes on the world is limited—those are adult sentiments. The Romans would have a slave whisper in the ears of a Roman general during his triumphal parade, sic transit gloria mundi. Our equivalent, which only adults, or children becoming adults, understand, comes from Johnny Cash:That old wheelIs gonna roll around once moreWhen it does It will even up our score.Adolescents often indulge in magical fantasies, dreaming about being able to manipulate a world that deep down they know is out of their control. That desire to shape their surroundings helps account for a fantastic belief in the power of names. To think that renaming an agency the Department of War can suddenly transform it is childish. Acknowledging the messiness of reality, its intractability, and the limits of what we can do about it is reserved for grown-ups.Names are a useful way to be mean. Labeling the class nerd a doofus may make the class bully feel bigger than he is—for a little while. Until, that is, the nerd gets into a good college by swotting away at the books, or the doofus, after judo lessons, lands the bully on his back. Trump is a master of the insulting nickname, a tool he uses not only to cut down his opponents but also because he likes to wound. He enjoys the petty cruelty of it.And to a particular kind of broken child, names can be a way of showing how clever you are in a similarly mean way. The Confederate names had been taken off the forts, but Hegseth no doubt feels that he has been very clever by, for example, restoring the name of Fort A. P. Hill using the last names or initials of Private Bruce Anderson, First Sergeant Robert A. Pinn, and Lieutenant Colonel Edward Hill—A. P. Hill, get it? One can practically see the smirks and elbow nudges and hear the “nyuck nyuck” of adolescent laughter. Hegseth wanted the Confederate names and, for now, got them in by the back door.Malevolent children can be obnoxious, or even scary. But they are also pitiful creatures. The ones who never grow up will spend their lives hurting others—strangers, friends, and family alike—and usually themselves. They will never feel the weight of adult responsibilities and remorse or know the adult satisfactions and the adult joys. Some of them will forever have an emptiness inside them that they cannot fill. They will live with a deep anxiety that their frauds and cheats will be discovered and that, in the end, the magical names they have devised will be wiped away and the spells dissolved. Their brokenness will remain irreparable, their fears and unhappiness unassuageable. Unfortunately, though, they may grow up to be Cabinet secretaries, and who knows—perhaps even president of the United States of America.