Donald Trump and his supporters can’t quite seem to agree: Should he be labeled the 45th president, the 47th president or both? As he takes the stage at rallies, he is sometimes introduced with both titles, making it almost sound as if he were two different people. Last Friday, he was treated to a birthday celebration in West Palm Beach, Florida, by a group of supporters called Club 47 USA — which used to be called Club 45 USA, but changed its name. The group’s website, however, is still club45usa.com. And the day before, Republican senators regaled him with a birthday cake containing two sets of numbered candles — a 45 and a 47. (According to a video posted on social media by one of his campaign accounts, only the 45 appeared to be lit when Trump received the cake.) Trump was, of course, the country’s 45th president, and now might become its 47th — a number he has plastered all over his campaign’s infrastructure, including the name of his joint fundraising committee, a URL for his fundraising website and his grassroots organizing program. There may well be a strategy at play here. Trump has not been elected the 47th president, and his embrace of the figure came well before it was even clear that he would be his party’s nominee — making it an attempt to burnish the air of inevitability he often tries to project. His references to 45 could be an antidote to the voter “amnesia” about his presidency. But the tussle between both can get confusing — and it serves as a quiet reminder that, no matter what he says about the 2020 election, someone else is No. 46. A Cleveland-esque campaign twist Trump is not the first president to try to serve nonconsecutive terms. That distinction goes to Grover Cleveland, the nation’s 22nd and 24th leader. But I could not find evidence that Cleveland slapped those numbers on his campaign buttons and pamphlets the way Trump has on his oversize hats and stickers. Trump seems to be officially embracing the “47.” Visitors to his campaign website can click a button to donate $47. And he mentions the number frequently on the trail. “As soon as I lift my hand from the Bible as your 47th president, I will seal the border, shut down the invasion of millions and millions of people coming into our country, and we will start an energy revolution,” he declared this year in New Hampshire. Trump’s effort to claim the number 47 before he has won it has darker undertones, coming from a former president who tried to overturn the last election and won’t commit to accepting this year’s results. Many of his Republican allies continue to refer to him as “the president” — a choice that could either be seen as routine usage of the highest title he has held or as a reflection that much of the party rejects President Joe Biden’s legitimacy. But he can’t quite let the 45 go, either. Last summer, my colleagues reported, when Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa was trying to persuade all of the Republican presidential candidates to sign a football helmet she wanted to use to sell tickets to one of her annual political events, Trump returned it with his name plus the numbers “45” and “47.” And as he campaigned in arenas during the primaries, his team often set the scoreboard to 45 and 47, my colleague Michael Gold told me — as if to signal that both the primary and the general election were already over. 45 minus 47 = -2 This numerical tussle has also made its way to Trump’s merchandise. The Trump Store still stocks a “45” collection, offering blankets, pickleball paddles or flags emblazoned with the number 45. At his campaign website, however, one can buy polo shirts, hats and stickers that say 45-47 — with the two numbers separated by a small hyphen that also reads as a minus sign. It almost seems like a simple math problem: 45 minus 47 equals negative 2. There appears to be some disagreement, at least among merchandise providers, about the house style for capturing this unusual campaign twist. Last week, at Trump’s rally in Las Vegas, I noticed that some of his supporters wore MAGA hats that said 45/47 on the side. That looked like a fraction (45/47, for anybody counting, equals .9574). Others had the hats that said 45-47 on the side — and Antwon Williams, 42, was selling them, so I asked why he had chosen to use a hyphen rather than a slash in his designs. To Williams, a private seller of Trump merchandise who has no connection with the campaign, the hyphen was sending a particular message. It means Trump is presidents 45 through 47, he explained. “I believe he never stopped being our president,” Williams said. It was an intentional effort, he said, to erase the 46th president, Joe Biden. A slash, he said, would mean Trump is 45 or 47. A period, he said, would indicate some kind of pause in his presidency. And a comma? “Never,” he said. The symbolism was lost on at least one of his customers, David Ramirez, who had picked up a couple of red hats with 45-47 on the side. “He’s the 45th president, and will be the 47th president,” Ramirez said when asked to explain its meaning. “He’s not the 46th president,” Ramirez added. “Joe Biden is.”
