Weeks before retaking office, Trump decided to add the measure to his Day 1 agenda, elevating a liberal joke that had become a conservative meme into an action that has come to symbolize the tenor of his term.
PRESIDENT-ELECT Donald Trump was sitting with a group of advisers at Mar-a-Lago, batting around ideas and preparing for a news conference, when he first verbalized an idea that many had not heard previously: He wanted to rename the Gulf of Mexico. Henceforth, he decided, it would be called the Gulf of America.
Those in the room were immediately enthusiastic, and he began toying with revealing the concept when he went in front of the television cameras later in the day, deciding he would do so if the moment struck him.
It did.
“We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring,” he said later that day. “That covers a lot of territory. The Gulf of America, what a beautiful name and it’s appropriate.”
Like many of Trump’s ideas, it is difficult to pinpoint where exactly he got the inspiration. Television host Stephen Colbert had made it a bit of political satire nearly 15 years earlier. A Democratic lawmaker in Mississippi had filed legislation to rename the coast off his state in 2012, also as a joke. Conservative voices for months had been promoting it as a way to showcase American pride and dominance.
But it was Trump, weeks before taking office, who ultimately decided to add the renaming to his Day 1 agenda, elevating a liberal joke turned conservative meme into an Oval Office action that has come to symbolize the tenor of his new presidency.
While many of his actions have had more far-reaching consequences, the renaming of this international body of water has caused an outsize amount of controversy, making the rounds of late-night talk show monologues and leading Trump to ban one of the country’s preeminent news wire services from the Oval Office and Air Force One. And Trump has reveled in all of it — seizing on the symbolism, riling up his base and eagerly antagonizing those he deems to be his opponents.
The day before the inauguration, as he was fine-tuning his speech, he looked at some of those in the prep session with him. He wondered aloud whether he should put it in the upcoming address that would be watched by millions, according to an administration official who was there, before ultimately deciding to, in fact, put it in his speech.
“We’re very proud of this country,” Trump said Tuesday during remarks to reporters from the same Mar-a-Lago ballroom where he first announced his decision six weeks earlier. “And we want it to be the Gulf of America.”
Political satire
The basin connected to the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea has for centuries — even before the founding of the United States — been called the Gulf of Mexico. The maritime boundaries, set by bilateral agreements in the 1970s, give the United States claim to some 46 percent of the gulf, while Mexico has 49 percent and Cuba the remainder.
In 2010, shortly after a BP oil spill off the Gulf Coast, Colbert used his satirical persona on his show on Comedy Central to raise money for those affected. He called it “The Colbert Nation Gulf of America Fund.”
Colbert explained on air that he had made a deal with Microsoft, with the company agreeing to donate $2,500 to the fund each time he said the word “Bing” to draw attention to the company’s online search engine. He said the word 40 times, bringing in $100,000.
“I don’t think we can call it the Gulf of Mexico anymore,” Colbert said at the end of his show. “We broke it, we bought it.”
In early 2012, a state lawmaker in Mississippi filed legislation with what he considered a novel idea at the time. The waters previously named the Gulf of Mexico would take a new name: Gulf of America. Rep. Steve Holland, a Democrat, had also meant it as political satire, attempting to draw attention to what he characterized as Republicans’ fear of Hispanics.
“Let’s just get rid of the Mexico thing and have the Gulf of America. And we’ll be very unique in this country, and we’ll be on an island unto ourselves,” he told Mississippi Public Broadcasting at the time. “Everyone else can have the Gulf of Mexico, but we’ll have the Gulf of America.”
That was more than a decade ago, when Donald Trump was still a businessman and a star of reality TV, long before he would take the idea and transform it into anunironicsource of inspiration for a Republican base that he had remade.
Inspiration in the gulf
On a sunny Sunday afternoon in April, conservative activist Kevin Posobiec left church and joined a buddy who wanted to rent WaveRunners for $70 an hour and head out near Tampa Bay into the gulf waters. Posobiec, the brother of fellow right-wing firebrand Jack Posobiec, loved the adrenaline rush, vaultingup and down on the waves, alternating between racing and stopping to take photos.
“I was like, ‘Man, this is like such an America thing to do,’” he said. “It just came to me. I said, it’s like you see Hulk Hogan and think, ‘Man, that’s America.’ Just having fun in the sun, a Florida man kind of moment. I was like, ‘Man, I’m in the gulf. What if it was the Gulf of America?’”
That evening, he posted a photo and captioned it, “Cruising the Gulf of America. It’s proper name come 2025.”
His brother, Jack, a far-right activist known for peddling conspiracy theories, delivering controversial speeches and trolling political adversaries online, amplified the message to his 3 million followers.
But the concept didn’t really take off. Trump didn’t talk about it on the campaign trail. And it wasn’t regularly pushed out by voices he typically listens to.
But months later, on Dec. 22, with Trump’s team busy preparing a raft of executive orders and many of the other moves he would make at the start of his second term, Jack Posobiec recalled his brother’s idea.
“While we’re at it,” he wrote on social media. “Gulf of Mexico? I think you mean Gulf of America.”
It is unclear whether Trump was made aware of those messages. But he does follow Jack Posobiec, and Trump aide Natalie Harp often prints out messages for him to read.
It was about two weeks later when Trump held the news conference at Mar-a-Lago. He disparaged Mexico and Canada, and he talked about taking over Greenland and the Panama Canal. And then he mentioned his new effort to use the name Gulf of America, tying the move to long-held grievances over Mexico’s handling of immigration and drug trafficking.
As soon as Trump made the pronouncement, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) ordered her staff to work on legislation attempting to make the change through Congress.
“It’s our gulf,” she said. “The rightful name is the Gulf of America and it’s what the entire world should refer to it as.”
Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and his team quickly reworked an executive order they had already drawn up to change the name of North America’s tallest peak, Denali in Alaska, back to Mount McKinley. A fourth section was added to the order that was titled “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness.”
The order gave the interior secretary 30 days to make the change formal and update the Geographic Names Information System, the database of millions of official names for geographic features.
‘Even bigger than the Super Bowl’
When the president’s staff realized that he was going to the Super Bowl in New Orleans and would be flying over the gulf, they pitched the idea of marking the occasion with a bit of theatrics. The president loved it, so they printed out a map. They arranged for Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, already planning to come along, to sign paperwork officially ordering the map changes just before Air Force One took off.
While in the air, Trump called reporters to the front of the plane, a map on display behind him, and signed a proclamation declaring the day “Gulf of America Day.”
The flight crew then broke in on the overhead system.
“Attention, ladies and gentlemen, if you could please direct your attention out the right side of the aircraft,” the announcer said, “Air Force One is currently in international waters, for the first time in history flying over the recently renamed Gulf of America. Please enjoy the flight.”
Trump was pleased. “We’re flying right over it right now!” he said. “We thought this would be appropriate. Even bigger than the Super Bowl. This is a big thing.”
Even for supporters, it was hard to believe that what had started as a playful gag was now reality.
“I can’t stop laughing at it that he actually signed an executive order. I couldn’t believe it,” Kevin Posobiec said. “They’re making all kinds of maps and T-shirts. It went bonkers online. They actually got Google and Apple to do it.”
One company registered a trademark and began selling Gulf of America globes for $250 and a commemorative coin for $100, as well as hats, sweatshirts and T-shirts.
Adam Peterson a few years earlier had named his Louisiana-based fishing charter company Gulf of America Outfitters, a patriotic play on words. Now, his phone was blowing up, and business was suddenly booming.
Last year, Peterson’s outfit drew $33,000 in bookings for all of February. This year, he’s booked $191,000 just in the first three weeks. The company, which for two years has been selling “Making the Gulf Great Again” T-shirts and sweatshirts, is doing about $1,000 in sales per day, which he used to make each month.
“It’s been a wild two months, for sure. The phone doesn’t stop ringing, the texts don’t stop coming,” Peterson said. “People in general are more upset about the person doing it than the name change. The Gulf Coast and people down here have been taken by it.”
With the name now official, at least according to the U.S. government, changes began to ripple around.
BP and Chevron have updated their websites to call it “Gulf of America.”
“That’s the position of the U.S. government now,” Chevron CEO Michael Wirth said in a Jan. 31 conference call with analysts.
The same BP whose Deepwater Horizon oil platform was responsible for the oil spill that Colbert had raised money to combat on his show was now quickly rewriting how it referred to the water where it had occurred. Now, BP refers to the disaster as the “Gulf of America oil spill.”
And the maps run by Bing, the Microsoft search engine that helped Colbert raise the $100,000 for “The Colbert Nation Gulf of America Fund”? They, too, have updated their maps.
Google also updated theirs, a decision over which Mexico has threatened to file lawsuits.
News organizations have not been as quick to accede to the changes. The Associated Press updated its style guide on Jan. 23 to indicate that it would continue using the name “Gulf of Mexico” because it is a global news organization and the name has not been adopted outside of the United States.
Even though other news outlets — including The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times — have similar policies, Trump has largely focused his ire on the AP. He was furious about that decision, according to an administration official, and banned its reporters from the Oval Office and Air Force One, where the wire service for decades has been part of a permanent pool of reporters covering the president.
“We’re holding them out of any news conferences right now,” he said Thursday night at the Republican Governors Association. He suggested that they could file a lawsuit. “Maybe they’ll win,” he added. “Doesn’t matter. It’s just something that we feel strongly about.”
On Friday, the Associated Press filed just such a lawsuit.
The name change has created quandaries for television meteorologists, who now simply say “the gulf” so they don’t alienate any viewers. And leaders at the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf of Mexico, a Mobile, Alabama, museum dedicated to the history and culture of the body of water, are daunted by the prospect of redoing exhibits and changing the name of their center.
But even while Trump has banished the AP, a review of various government websites shows that many are still not following the president’s directive.
As of Friday afternoon, sites operated by a wide range of federal agencies — including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Transportation and Federal Communications Commission — were still displaying the Gulf of Mexico on some of their online maps.
