Trump Tower Chicago stands at 401 North Wabash Avenue, along the Chicago River, with the word “Trump” spelled out in 20-foot letters visible from most of downtown. A petition with more than 25,000 signatures wants to change that address to 401 Barack Hussein Obama Avenue, and sympathetic aldermen are already drafting ordinances to make it happen.
The petition was created on May 4 by a Chicago resident named Bryce Jones, who described experiencing the weight of Trump’s policies firsthand. “This would send a small message about the values we uphold as a city, those of inclusivity, resilience, and forward-thinking change, and fighting back in any way possible,” the Change.org page reads. “We propose to launch a winning vanity war,” it adds, a response to Trump’s Iran conflict being described by organizers as a “failed vanity war.”
The signature count has climbed steadily, with momentum accelerating as the Obama Presidential Center prepared to open on June 19.
The geography makes the whole thing considerably more pointed.
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Trump Tower sits along the Chicago River at the exact address that would change if the city approved the renaming. The Obama Presidential Center, meanwhile, sits on the South Side in Jackson Park, miles away. Both buildings would carry Obama’s name in the same city, one by invitation and one very much not.
Chicago has never warmed to Trump, and the numbers bear that out.
He received just 22% of the vote there in the 2024 presidential election, and the tower has served as a protest gathering point since 2016. In fall 2025, the Trump administration conducted “Operation Midway Blitz,” an immigration enforcement crackdown that resulted in more than 1,500 arrests in two months. The petition cites the operation specifically, alongside the Iran war and rising gas prices, as reasons for the renaming push.
The idea itself is not new, which is part of what gives it staying power.
In 2019, a MoveOn.org petition attracted more than 260,000 signatures calling on New York City to rename the stretch of Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower there as “President Barack H. Obama Avenue.” “I honestly started it as a joke,” Elizabeth Rowin, that petition’s organizer, told Newsweek. “I saw a comedian joke about how it would make Trump so mad if it was named after former President Obama and thought why not.”
That effort did not succeed, and the Chicago petition faces the same core obstacle: a full legal street name change requires City Council approval, and living people are not eligible for honorary street names under Chicago’s current rules.
Several aldermen have nonetheless introduced ordinances in support, suggesting the political appetite exists even if the legal path remains narrow.
Trump has not commented on the petition. He has, however, spent recent months posting AI images of the Obama Presidential Center as a garbage can, calling it a disaster and insisting nobody knows who Obama is.
Featured image via X screengrab
