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Gulf War Three: Is renaming the Gulf of Mexico really necessary?
In order to demonstrate his intense disapproval of the idea of needlessly renaming things for stupid political purposes, Donald Trump has just … needlessly renamed things for stupid political purposes.
Amongst the blizzard of Executive Orders Trump issued on his very first day in office was one called “RESTORING NAMES THAT HONOR AMERICAN GREATNESS”. Note that word “RESTORING” there, in big fat capital letters. This implies Trump was just giving things back their true names, which had been altered or obscured under Year Zero Democrat rule during the Biden and Obama regimes before him. The Executive Order’s reasoning ran thus:
“It is in the national interest to promote the extraordinary heritage of our Nation and ensure future generations of American citizens celebrate the legacy of our American heroes. The naming of our national treasures, including breathtaking natural wonders and historic works of art, should honor the contributions of visionary and patriotic Americans in our Nation’s rich past.”
With this in mind, Trump decided to rename America’s highest mountain as Mount McKinley, the peak having recently been rechristened Denali, meaning, “The High One”, this being the name used for it by Alaskan Koyukon Native Indians for many generations before the white man had ever arrived there. In 1896, however, a white American prospector named William A. Dickey visited to survey the place properly, later naming it after President William McKinley, in memory of the politician’s assassination in 1901.

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Denial is a river in Egypt, Denali is a mountain in Alaska
Although there was no actual association between McKinley and the area, the name stuck and was officially adopted by the US Government for the peak in 1917. Kokuyon Indians were still free to keep on calling it Denali, but officially it was now Mount McKinley, a name used unthinkingly by most. In 2015, however, ever-eager to pander to the anti-colonialist caucus, Democratic President Barack Obama self-righteously intervened to decree its name should henceforth “return” to being Denali, a name it had never actually legally borne at all.
As McKinley, like Trump himself, was a bigly fine fan of the concept of international trade tariffs, known as “The Napoleon of Protection[ism]”, in 2024 Donald took belated exception to Obama’s unnecessary virtue-signalling measure, and decided to signal to his Republican electorate the precise reverse political message: that, from now on, America’s past was no longer going to be sycophantically rewritten from the sole perspective of the contemporary Left in order to trash its history as a worthless nation led by nothing but white supremacists.
In 2022, Scientific American ran a piece in support of the Democrats’ wider recent mass renaming of various toponyms (the technical term for place-names) along similar “racial justice”-related lines, making specific disapproving reference to what they saw as being President McKinley’s past as a mass murdering, colonialist evil-doer:
“Under President McKinley, the U.S. annexed Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Filipinos revolted, and the war McKinley waged against them claimed the lives of about 5,000 Americans and 200,000 Filipinos. This was the namesake for our continent’s tallest mountain.”
How many people have died and been conquered in the name of Islam down the centuries? Significantly more than 205,000, I would imagine. Would Scientific American therefore like to publicly recommend Islamabad be rechristened as something less potentially triggering to all the many victims of Islamic colonisation down the centuries too, then? No, because the Muslims were the wrong colour colonisers.
Once you start with this kind of thing, there’s no end to it. Even America itself was named after a white colonialist, of sorts, in shape of the Italian navigator and explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Shouldn’t Scientific American rename itself too, then, in order to avoid the Indigenous descendants of all those squaws and braves later dispossessed and murdered by the invading pale-skins?
There is currently a Native Indian campaign to rechristen America wholesale as “Turtle Island”, because that is what certain tribes once called the place. But, then again, certain other tribes didn’t call the place this, so to rename the USA after said marine reptile would just create further problems, seeming as it would to privilege certain Indians’ nomenclature over that of others. Plus, Scientific Turtle Islander just sounds too much of a mouthful.
It’s debatable how widely many such official renamings of toponyms are obeyed by the general public in any case. In 2022, authorities in Wales mandated that the country’s tallest peak, known as Mount Snowdon for centuries, after Anglo-Saxon words meaning something like “Snow-Dune”, was to become legally known as Yr Wyddfa instead, a native Welsh term for the place dating back to 1284. The fact that the English name was provably older, being traceable back to 1095, mattered not; it was still an absolutely essential “anti-colonial” measure, preached the local National Park Authority. But, in spite of their official ordinance, how many people worldwide actually call it Yr Wyddfa instead of Mount Snowdon? Basically just employees of the Welsh Tourist Board. Do you still call Burma Burma, or Myanmar? Or Ireland Ireland, or Eire? Personally, I’m so old-fashioned as to still think of Iraq as being Mesopotamia.
A Gulf in understanding
In and of itself, I think Trump was well within his rights to pursue this specific act of renaming, on the grounds that Obama’s initial act of doing so back in 2015 was wholly unnecessary, being a complete waste of Federal time, effort and money. So is Trump subsequently renaming Denali as Mount McKinley, some would argue, but, on its own terms, it could have stood as a valuable signal to the Democrats that “If you engage in needless culture war tactics of rewriting history like this against our side, then as soon as we get back in power, the Republicans will only start changing such names right back again under MAGA leadership, so please save us all the bother next time you win and leave things as they are, and we’ll extend the same courtesy to you.”
Then, his point made, Trump could have graciously refrained from replacing any other well-known and age-old names for things for spurious political gain, in order to appear the bigger and better man. Instead, in the very same Executive Order, he immediately went ahead and ludicrously ordered the Gulf of Mexico be rechristened as the Gulf of America instead:
“The area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America. The Gulf was a crucial artery for America’s early trade and global commerce. It is the largest gulf in the world, and the United States coastline along this remarkable body of water spans over 1,700 miles and contains nearly 160 million acres. Its natural resources and wildlife remain central to America’s economy today … and in recognition of this flourishing economic resource and its critical importance to our Nation’s economy and its people, I am directing that it officially be renamed the Gulf of America.”
Instantly, the moral high ground was now lost. As President, Trump does actually have the legal right to do this – at least from a purely domestic perspective. He can grandiosely mandate that Federal departments burn dollars and time reprinting maps and updating databases to fit in with his fantasy if he really wants, but next to nobody else across the rest of the world, including America’s closest allies like the United Kingdom, appear to have any intention of going along with him in this. When he sits behind his desk in his DOGE Department Of Government Efficiency, one of the first needless, money-eating schemes Trump’s new anti-waste tsar Elon Musk should scrap is surely this one. Then again, Musk equally meaninglessly renamed Twitter as X, so has poor form in this area himself.
Renaming the Gulf just makes The Donald look like a grandiose megalomaniac, akin to when President Xi goes around the world bullying smaller nations into not calling Taiwan Taiwan on their own maps, so as to back up their own claims to the island’s ownership. As Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo joked, Trump’s rechristening of the Gulf meant that henceforth her own nation should begin referring to the USA itself as “Mexican America”.
I am unavoidably reminded of David Foster Wallace’s satirical 1996 novel Infinite Jest, in which the USA, Mexico and Canada have all been forcibly united into one grand continental mega-state at the behest of an insane entertainment-star-turned-politician President, just as certain MAGA supporters, and Trump himself, have half-jokingly floated. The mega-state in question was called Organization of North American Nations – or ONAN, because its proponents and architects were all a bunch of total ONANists, both literally and figuratively.
The English language has no genders
The most egregious attempt at falsely renaming things for ideological purposes against all known prior laws of reality under Democrat rule in recent years, of course, was their efforts to call people with penises “women”, and people with vaginas “men” by sheer force of law and Federal diktat; one of President Biden’s own first day Executive Orders was to replace the word “sex” with “gender identity” in various pieces of Federal legislation. Another Executive Order repealing such Biden-era abuses of linguistic relabelling just signed into law by Trump was called “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT”, which does precisely what it says on the tin.
Trump could very effectively have rhetorically packaged this alongside his “RESTORING NAMES THAT HONOR AMERICAN GREATNESS” Order, along the following lines: “Just as Mount McKinley is now being called Mount McKinley once again, so a man is being called a man, and a woman is being called a woman, once more. The Republicans are the Party of reality; the Democrats the Party of lies. No more FAKE relabelling of FACT from us!”
Instead, by forcibly transitioning the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, Trump somewhat undoes such good work through sheer hubris. Next time the Democrats win, they will obviously just change the Gulf’s name straight back again, and could easily use this as rhetorical justification for equally instantaneously rechristening what men and women are too, on Trump’s own terms but reversed: “Just as the Gulf of Mexico IS the Gulf of Mexico, so trans women ARE women!” Every change of future US President, are the labels within America’s Geography and Biology textbooks alike each due to be remade according to which Party he or she represents?
Earlier in January, the US House of Representatives passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, preventing men who delusionally claim to be women from competing in female arenas. All but two Democrats opposed the Bill, deciding to arbitrarily rechristen it “The Child Predator Empowerment Act” instead, on the mad grounds that it would supposedly enable a new cadre of “Taliban-like” genital-inspectors to peer down inside kids’ underwear to ensure they didn’t have the wrong bits lurking down there, prior to every school sports lesson.
Maybe, next time the Dems win, they really will officially rename said Bill “The Child Predator Empowerment Act”, before then immediately repealing it? Trouble is, allowing teenage boys into teenage girls’ changing rooms by its very definition acts to empower child predators, meaning the Republicans could legitimately then rechristen the Democrats’ own replacement Bill as “The Child Predator Empowerment Act” in their turn, before then later … well, you can see where I’m going with this.
As the very fact the Democrats wanted to arbitrarily redefine the meanings of the terms “male” and “female” shows, the Orwellian abuse of language that can be employed in renaming things for no good reason is a clear and present signal of potential political overreach. After the French Revolution, the very names of the calendar months were hyperbolically transformed into things like Brumaire (“Misty Month”), Frimaire (“Frosty Month”) and Nivose (“Snowy Month”); across the Channel in non-revolutionary Britain, sceptics satirically rechristened them Wheezy, Sneezy and Freezy, like early Seven Dwarfs. Even worse, the former dictator of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, once rechristened not only a month of the year, but the Turkmen word for “bread”, after his beloved dead mother, Gurbansoltan; hungry and humiliated citizens literally had to ask in shops for “A loaf of Gurbansoltan, please,” at least in theory.
So, Donald Drumpf (his original Germanic family name before it became Anglicised following the clan’s immigration to America) has a fair way left to fall yet in relation to such matters. If at any point he finally gets around to following through on his recent threat to forcibly annex Greenland, before then suddenly renaming the place Orangeland, we’ll know that power has truly gone to his head.
Should other geographic features be renamed? The English Channel?
Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest, “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science”, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, was released in 2023.
Image credit: Bigstock
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mrscracker commented 2025-01-30 23:11:31 +1100It’s true Mr. Ronald that people in the US are reminded that America/American can refer to all of the Americas, not just the USA. I’m not sure it’s scolding though. But yes, referring to the Gulf as the Gulf of America would include Mexico and the US both.
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Ronald K commented 2025-01-30 11:04:04 +1100We’re constantly scolded that “America” refers to two whole continents, not just one small country on one of them. In that case, this is an “own goal” on the President’s part. Also, it ruins a classic hit song, #1 in 1959, about a battle won by this President’s favorite president.
Note also that the year before he was born, his hometown grandiosely renamed a major street "Avenue of the Americas. To this day, everybody still calls it Sixth Avenue. -
mrscracker commented 2025-01-30 09:17:11 +1100I’m glad you have a heart for Haiti Mr. Mouse. I do also. I have family who lived there & many fond memories.
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Anon Emouse commented 2025-01-30 06:45:10 +1100“Complicated” is that how you phrase being forced to pay billions of francs, at cannon point, to pay a ransom for having the gall to throw off the chains of oppression and freeing yourself from from the yoke of slavery?
mrscracker, you are being very charitable with your words, often to the detriment of understanding the WHY as to where we are now. -
mrscracker commented 2025-01-30 04:36:09 +1100Haiti hasn’t had much of a break from the very beginning. It’s true. Haiti’s history like everyone’s else’s is complicated & so were its leaders.
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Anon Emouse commented 2025-01-30 04:05:58 +1100Leaders in the US worked with France actively against Haitian independence, forcing them to pay billions of dollars to France that crippled their economy for more than a century (coming up on two).
There is no “excuse” for this – Haitians rose up and threw off the shackles of slavery, only for the US and France to make them pay money for their freedom 30 years later. -
mrscracker commented 2025-01-30 02:12:00 +1100Good morning Miss Susan. Thank you so much for your comments. I’m not really debating anyone,. I try to look for the good in people first & apply that to history & history’s characters. We all are products of the era & culture we live in & whatever we do that’s talented, courageous, generous, tolerant, or sacrificial should be seen with that in mind.
Most of my colonial ancestors fought against Washington & supported the Crown. But I still admire George Washington, especially for his religious tolerance & fairmindedness. I also admire George III who was a very decent, family man & Christian.
My comments weren’t meant as partisan. I think the War Between the States was an absolute disaster that could have been avoided. And I believe that applies to the American Revolution, too. If we’d found a workable agreement with Britain, slavery in the US could have ended decades earlier & without bloodshed, Just as it was ended in other British colonies.
I was just reflecting that virtually no one in the pre abolition Americas, North or South, was untouched by slavery in some way. And leaders both in the USA & even places like Haiti worked for independence & were themselves slave owners.
History, like people, is very complicated. -
Susan Rohrbach commented 2025-01-30 00:33:25 +1100mrscracker, you have adeptly demonstrated the technique of Lost Cause propaganda; despite having lost the debate, you wishfully frame it as a win for you, expecting that people will ignore the cognitive dissonance. My earlier remarks remain just as true.
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Anon Emouse commented 2025-01-29 22:49:53 +1100Emberson is correct; it’s choosing not to honor that history
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Emberson Fedders commented 2025-01-29 14:59:23 +1100To remove a statue is not to erase history.
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mrscracker commented 2025-01-29 08:53:14 +1100Robert E. Lee is one of my great heroes Miss Susan & I admire Washington also. I’m very familiar with the Lee Chapel at W&L.. Thank you for mentioning that.
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Susan Rohrbach commented 2025-01-29 05:26:25 +1100Mrs Cracker, it is also Trump’s dodge, to hide behind Jefferson but Robert E Lee ain’t no Jefferson and the confederates rejected TJ’s words, trying to create a permanent slavee gulag regime. Lincoln agrees with me in giving “all honor to Jefferson” for his immortal words of liberation.
Statues of Nazis are statues of Nazis; they can never be said to be beautiful. Lee was used to create the lost cause mystique with his many statues, the most egregious case being the “,recumbent Lee” hagiographic which was featured at the center of Washington and Lee University’s chapel for many decades, hypnotizing many W and L undergraduates and grooming them to the Lost Cause. If this had happened with Nazi statues, there would have been a clear case for educational malpractice. But because so many of us grew up around the confedified Town squares, we don’t recognize the hypnosis. -
Anon Emouse commented 2025-01-29 04:28:48 +1100One interesting side effect of trumps executive order is that everyone in the US is now legally female.
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Anon Emouse commented 2025-01-29 03:15:52 +1100J’ai peur que je ne parle pas d’italien, M. Szabo.
And I think you’re missing the point of it all. But by all means, die on that hill -
Christopher Szabo commented 2025-01-29 02:47:12 +1100Oh, A-Mowse, STOPPIT! You’re being almost as silly as Mr. Trump. Many towns and cities worldwide have multiple names. So what? And trans women are men. Finita la comédia!
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Anon Emouse commented 2025-01-29 02:32:02 +1100I don’t know, Christopher, they’re both nouns, after all.
We have squares which are a subset of rectangles with are a subset of quadrilaterals.
Language is so beautiful and ever-evolving. Don’t see why you’re ok with one and not the other. Trans women are women, after all. -
mrscracker commented 2025-01-29 02:27:34 +1100Miss Susan, I hate to open the old Charlottesville playbook again but since you brought it up, yes those were really beautiful statues & the one of Robert E. Lee especially so. Before everything became politicized people of every sort enjoyed that little park where Gen. Lee’s statue was located. Since then even a lovely statue of Lewis & Clark has been removed in Charlottesville. The Charlottesville powers that be haven’t always reflected their constituents wishes.
When we erase history we erase the good, the bad, & the ugly alike & we learn very little. In the UK & other places you can see memorials to all sorts of people throughout the centuries-some virtuous, some not so much. Sadly wokeism has made some inroads in Britain also lately.
I don’t know if you are a US citizen but if you are perhaps you already know that virtually everyone in the American British colonies & many others on into the 19th century were involved with slavery in some way. Directly or indirectly. We’d have to purge statues & memorials of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, President Grant & pretty much everyone else who held office back then , Full Orwell. -
Susan Rohrbach commented 2025-01-29 00:52:12 +1100For someone who likes to protect borders, Trump is sure intent on erasing them: Mexico, Canada, Greenland…sooner or later you’ll have just one convenient North American Union for the Globos to rule. Fancy that! (The NAU is not my idea; it’s the Club of Rome’s name for one of its “ten kingdoms” that will be easier to administer the world with.)
Renaming is like toppling statues. In principle this redoing should be done only if the statue/name belonged to someone now recognized as evil like Nazis or slavery (oops! remember that Trump repeatedly called confederate statues “beautiful”!) The selection of a new name should be careful to avoid a new dilemma in future. I vote to rename confederate town squares with the everlastingly true “created equal”, or “Declaration” to represent the ideas scorned by the Confederates, but universal nonetheless.
In any case, if any vestige of USA survives once it’s swallowed by NAU, let it be “created equal”, which gave the promissory note to abolish abortion as it had slavery, before it got raped out of the GOP platform by president warp speed. -
Christopher Szabo commented 2025-01-29 00:19:33 +1100Anon Emouse. The two do not follow.
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Anon Emouse commented 2025-01-29 00:12:10 +1100“You can have more than one name for places”…
Almost like you can have more than one type of man and woman, right? -
Christopher Szabo commented 2025-01-28 22:45:52 +1100Re-naming the Gulf of Mexico to that of America strikes me as daft. But then, as Mrs Cracker points out, you can have more than one name for places. Like the English Channel which the French call la Manche. No problem!
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mrscracker commented 2025-01-28 21:40:12 +1100Thank you Mr. Jurgen for that interesting historical information.
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mrscracker commented 2025-01-28 21:38:17 +1100I must not have posted my earlier comment correctly or with the right article. Sorry, but I’ll try again.
The Sea of Cortez is also known as the Gulf of California. It’s not impossible to have two different names for the same body of water or location.
Mexico is a part of North America and everyone below the US border consider themselves "Americans ". Citizens of the USA think they have exclusive rights to call themselves Anerican but it can refer to anyone from Latin America also. I think the “Gulf of Mexico” will stick around on our maps though. We’ll see. -
Jürgen Siemer commented 2025-01-28 17:52:52 +1100According to a German article on Trump’s German ancestor, the original name of the family was indeed Drumpf. But the name had been changed to Trump already during the 30years war (1618-1648).
Such small name changes were happening often during that time, simply because written German was not standardized and local officials and priests, who kept marriage books and spoke in the local dialect, offen made small errors, when they tried to write in high German.
The 30years war was the original catastrophy in the German history, approximately a third of the population, in some regions even 2 thirds had disappeared. -
Anon Emouse commented 2025-01-28 12:52:00 +1100I’m just impressed Steven managed to shoe-horn in digs at the Democrats into an article about Trump’s insanity. Bravo, Steven, well done indeed.
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Emberson Fedders commented 2025-01-28 12:23:16 +1100Betteridge’s Law.
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