Palm Beach International Airport has been renamed President Donald J. Trump International Airport, and the new branding is already doing what airport branding rarely does: sending people online to count feathers, stripes and leaves.
The South Florida airport’s new name took effect after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a renaming law in March. The change makes Trump the first sitting president to have an airport named for him, according to Futurism. Eric Trump first showed the new logo on X in May.
The emblem is a gold, seal-like eagle design. It appears to borrow heavily from the visual grammar of the Great Seal of the United States, with an eagle, shield and olive branches. The execution is the part drawing scrutiny.
Online critics have pointed to a set of mismatched details that are familiar to anyone who has spent too much time staring at image-generator output. The eagle’s talons are misshapen and do not match each other. Its legs are uneven. The base of the legs turns into a cluster of inconsistent blobs. The wings do not have the same number of feathers. The two olive branches have different leaf counts. The shield has 11 stripes, rather than the 13 used on the actual Great Seal.
A Reddit thread calling the logo AI-generated spread widely after users annotated the emblem’s irregularities. That does not prove how the image was made. It does, however, put the logo in the large and growing bucket of public-facing political graphics whose small details look less designed than hallucinated.
Futurism reported that a request for comment sent to President Donald J. Trump International Airport was not answered.
A seal-like mark without the seal
Federal law tightly restricts use of the Great Seal. That makes a near-seal design a convenient workaround for an airport that wants the presidential symbolism without using the official mark. If artificial intelligence was used, it would also explain the emblem’s strange failure mode: the overall silhouette reads as official, while the details collapse under inspection.
The Trump orbit has already made frequent use of AI-generated imagery. Futurism reported that Trump last fall posted an AI-made video depicting himself as a fighter pilot spraying peaceful protesters with liquid diarrhea. In April, he posted AI images showing himself as Jesus Christ and as the pope, drawing anger from some Christian supporters. He has also used AI-generated video to promote projects including a White House ballroom.
The airport logo is no longer just a social-media artifact. A large sign bearing the emblem has been installed at the airport’s main entrance ramp in West Palm Beach, according to an AFP/Getty photograph, and Futurism reported that the mark appears elsewhere inside the airport.
The result is a civic rebrand built around a symbol that looks expensive from the road and increasingly weird the closer anyone looks at it.
This story draws on original reporting from Futurism.
