The executive order rechristening the body of water known internationally as the “Gulf of Mexico” is not an easy document to take seriously. Portions of it read like a child’s research paper: “The Gulf is also home to vibrant American fisheries teeming with snapper, shrimp, grouper, stone crab, and other species.” The import of this and other facts is never quite explained. Perhaps the snapper will taste better now that it comes from the “Gulf of America.”
So, no, this is not a serious document. Is it an illegitimate one? The Associated Press, one of the world’s premier news-gathering organizations, appears to think so. Last month, a few days after Donald Trump issued the order, the AP announced that it would continue using the name “Gulf of Mexico.” This week, the Trump administration retaliated by barring the AP’s reporters from covering White House events, placing the agency in an unenviable bind. The AP argues, convincingly, that denying access to a media outlet because of its choice of words violates the First Amendment. To cave now would be to surrender on the constitutional issue. But this is a fight that Trump is clearly happy to have—especially to the extent that it draws attention away from his more egregious affronts to the public interest and the rule of law. And it’s a fight that the AP probably should never have picked in the first place.
A huge share of Trump’s actions over the past four weeks fall somewhere on the spectrum from “legally questionable” to “plainly unconstitutional.” The “Gulf of America” rebrand is not one of them. A federal law passed in 1890 and updated in 1947 empowers the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to “standardize” how the federal government refers to places. The board answers to the secretary of the interior, who answers to the president. That’s the same legal authority under which the Obama administration changed the name “Mt. McKinley” to “Denali.”
In fact, if Barack Obama hadn’t done that, we probably wouldn’t be talking about the body of water between Mexico and Florida today. In physics, every action generates an equal and opposite reaction. In the Trump era, every progressive action generates an opposite MAGA reaction—but not an equal one. Trump’s executive order on “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness” began by changing “Denali” back to “Mt. McKinley.” Then, like an infomercial pitchman—but wait, there’s more—Trump tossed in the “Gulf of America” change, almost as a bonus.
Substantively, the stunt has nothing in common with the Obama administration’s decision on Mt. McKinley. The state of Alaska formally requested the change back in 1975, hardly a time of rampant woke excess, on the basis that “Denali”—the mountain’s historic name, still widely used by Alaskans—was a much better fit than “Mt. McKinley,” after a president who had never set foot in the state. Still, at a certain level of abstraction, Trump’s campaign to rename (and re-rename) mountains, gulfs, and military bases follows the same logic as the progressive version. Renaming a base named for a Confederate general, or a school named for a racist ex-president, is a declaration that values have changed since the days when those names were seen as acceptable. But in a democracy, values are determined by majority rule, and they don’t shift in only one direction. They can shift back.
The more that politicians mess around with place names, the more important it becomes for avowedly apolitical institutions to respond according to consistent principles. This is not so easy to do. In its style-guide update, the AP said that it would continue using “Gulf of Mexico” because the Gulf is an international body of water that has been known by that name for 400 years. “As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world,” it said, “the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.” It would, however, honor the change back to “Mt. McKinley” because, it said, “the area lies solely in the United States and as president, Trump has the authority to change federal geographical names within the country.” (The Atlantic’s style guide matches the AP’s on this matter.)
But the federal law giving Trump the power to rename Denali applies explicitly “to both domestic and foreign geographic names.” If the AP is going to follow the federal government’s legally valid naming conventions, then it should go along with “Gulf of America” by default, no matter how stupid it sounds. Carving an exception because of the Gulf’s 400-year history is arbitrary—the same sort of appeal to tradition that reactionaries make to prevent progressive-coded changes. Why, indeed, should modern society continue to honor a name imposed by Spanish conquistadors? Nor is it uncommon for different countries to call a shared body of water by different names: What Americans call the “Rio Grande,” Mexicans call the “Rio Bravo.” This has not caused any kind of breakdown of the collective geographic imagination.
News organizations routinely change how they refer to places, and many of these decisions carry the whiff of politics. In 2019, the AP announced that the Ukrainian city of Kiev would henceforth be spelled “Kyiv.” (Chicken Kiev would remain untouched.) “To many Ukrainians,” the AP explained, “the former spelling Kiev appears outdated because it is associated with a time when Ukraine was part of the Russian and Soviet states, rather than an independent country.” That is a perfectly understandable reason for making the change, but it is also, on its face, a political one. By contrast, news organizations have resisted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s request to refer to his country as “Türkiye”—even after the U.S. State Department agreed to do so in 2023.
These sorts of principled judgments are, as I said, hard to make. Trump makes them harder still by blowing past all standards of reasonableness or good faith, leaving high-minded institutions struggling to adapt. Even the best-designed rules break down when one side starts playing a completely different game. What if our president had decided to call it the “Gulf of Trump”? What if he had tried to rename the Atlantic Ocean? The man forces us to contemplate the previously unthinkable, because there is no norm or tradition that he won’t abrogate. For 134 years, “follow the Board on geographic names” was a simple, commonsense rule to follow. Then Trump got his hands on the Board.
None of this means that the Gulf of Mexico is now actually the Gulf of America in any kind of objective or even linguistic sense. Trump controls the Department of the Interior but not the English language. More than 12 years after it was renamed for Governor Hugh L. Carey, New Yorkers still refer to the passage between Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn as the “Battery Tunnel.” Washington, D.C.’s airport was named for Ronald Reagan in 1998; many if not most residents still call it “National.” The American people can decide for themselves whether to go with the “Gulf of Mexico” or the “Gulf of America.” And if you ever find yourself at a loss, here’s a tip: You can always just call it the “Gulf.”
The post ‘The Gulf of America’ Is the Wrong Fight to Pick appeared first on The Atlantic.
