In Trump’s mind, his 2016 nicknames weren’t a sideshow, but were one of the central reasons he crushed his primary opponents (“Little Marco” Rubio, “Low Energy Jeb” Bush, “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz) and ultimately beat “Crooked Hillary.”

Trump thinks names matter — in retail marketing and in politics:

The president spends inordinately more time thinking about how to brand and sell policies than he does studying the details of the policies themselves.

For example, one of the moments that most animated him during the tax reform debate was when he came up with the idea of calling the bill the “Cut, Cut, Cut Act.” He still rues that the “stiffs” in Congress insisted on calling it “the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.”