South Florida’s Palm Beach airport officially changed its name on Thursday to the President Donald J. Trump International Airport, and crews were already taking down old signs while new branding went up around the terminal. Airport officials said the change will not be finished in a day, with the old look and the new one expected to coexist for several weeks.
The first plane to arrive under the new name came shortly after 5 a.m.: Trump Force One, the Boeing 757 owned by The Trump Organization. Eric Trump was among the passengers, and he said he would be proud to see the initials DJT on his boarding pass. The three-letter airport code will not flip until Aug. 18, giving the airport a few more weeks to work through the transition from PBI to DJT.
The timing matters because the name change became official on Thursday after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation earlier this year that made it possible. The airport has become part of a growing set of Trump-related markers in the area, and the Trump family regularly uses it when visiting Mar-a-Lago in nearby Palm Beach. A stretch of road from the airport to the estate was renamed Donald J. Trump Boulevard earlier this year, a sign of how quickly the change has spread across the local map.
The shift is not just cosmetic. Airport officials have said the renaming is expected to cost as much as $5.5 million, covering new signs, branding and other updates, which means the work now moving through the terminal is only the first stage of a broader overhaul. That helps explain why the code change waits until Aug. 18: the name can change on paper before every sign, chart and brand element catches up.
Not everyone welcomed it. Keegan Collett, who was leaving the airport Thursday morning on his way to Cincinnati, said he was surprised to see the new name and did not think Donald J. Trump deserved an airport named after him. “At the end of the day, it’s just the name of an airport,” he said, adding that there are bigger things and that the fight over it feels like a distraction.
Eric Trump offered the opposite view, saying there is no person who has done more for Florida and the country than Donald J. Trump. For travelers, though, the practical marker to watch is still ahead: the airport is already changed in name, but the full switch from PBI to DJT is the date that will tell whether the new identity has truly settled in.
