Trump says he will change the name of the Gulf of Mexico. Can he do that?
President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday that he would move to try to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” a name he said has a “beautiful ring to it.”
It’s his latest suggestion to redraw the map of the Western Hemisphere. Trump has repeatedly referred to Canada as the “51st State,” demanded that Denmark consider ceding Greenland, and called for Panama to return the Panama Canal.
Here’s a look at his comment and what goes into a name.
Since his first run for the White House in 2016, Trump has repeatedly clashed with Mexico over a number of issues, including border security and the imposition of tariffs on imported goods. He vowed then to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it. The U.S. ultimately constructed or refurbished about 450 miles of wall during his first term.
The Gulf of Mexico is often referred to as the United States’ “Third Coast” due to its coastline across five southeastern states. Mexicans use a Spanish version of the same name for the gulf: “El Golfo de México.”
Americans and Mexicans diverge on what to call another key body of water, the river that forms the border between Texas and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas. Americans call it the Rio Grande; Mexicans call it the Rio Bravo.
Maybe, but it’s not a unilateral decision, and other countries don’t have to go along.
The International Hydrographic Organization — of which both the United States and Mexico are members — works to ensure all the world’s seas, oceans and navigable waters are surveyed and charted uniformly, and also names some of them. There are instances where countries refer to the same body of water or landmark by different names in their own documentation.
It can be easier when a landmark or body of water is within a country’s boundaries. In 2015, then-President Barack Obama approved an order from the Department of Interior to rename Mount McKinley — the highest peak in North America — to Denali, a move that Trump has also said he wants to reverse.
Just after Trump’s comments on Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said during an interview with podcaster Benny Johnson that she would direct her staff to draft legislation to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico, a move she said would take care of funding for new maps and administrative policy materials throughout the federal government.
The body of water has been depicted with that name for more than four centuries, an original determination believed to have been taken from a Native American city of “Mexico.”
Yes. In 2012, a member of the Mississippi Legislature proposed a bill to rename portions of the gulf that touch that state’s beaches “Gulf of America,” a move the bill author later referred to as a “joke.” That bill, which was referred to a committee, did not pass.
Two years earlier, comedian Stephen Colbert had joked on his show that, following the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it should be renamed “Gulf of America” because, “We broke it, we bought it.”
There’s a long-running dispute over the name of the Sea of Japan among Japan, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, with South Korea arguing that the current name wasn’t commonly used until Korea was under Japanese rule. At an International Hydrographic Organization meeting in 2020, member states agreed on a plan to replace names with numerical identifiers and develop a new digital standard for modern geographic information systems.
The Persian Gulf has been widely known by that name since the 16th century, although usage of “Gulf” and “Arabian Gulf” is dominant in many countries in the Middle East. The government of Iran threatened to sue Google in 2012 over the company’s decision not to label the body of water at all on its maps.
There have been other conversations about bodies of water, including from Trump’s 2016 opponent. According to materials revealed by WikiLeaks in a hack of her campaign chairman’s personal account, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2013 told an audience that, by China’s logic that it claimed nearly the entirety of the South China Sea, then the U.S. after World War II could have labeled the Pacific Ocean the “American Sea.”
Kinnard reported from Chapin, South Carolina, and can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP.
‘Gulf Of America’: Trump Says He’ll Rename Gulf Of Mexico
President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday he wants to change the name of the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America,” among a recent string of controversial suggestions to expand the U.S.’ global footprint.
Spanish explorer Sebastián de Ocampo in the early 1500s became the first European to discover the Gulf, according to the Texas State Historical Association, and it first appeared on maps as the “Gulf of Mexico” in the 1580s.
The announcement comes a day after Trump suggested the U.S. should buy Greenland, reprising a controversial idea he floated in 2019. His son, Donald Trump Jr., is visiting the island Tuesday for a day trip he said is dedicated to tourism. Greenlander and Danish officials have rejected the idea. Trump also facetiously suggested Monday Canada should become the “51st state,” and he’s more seriously suggested he will demand control of the Panama Canal, complaining that the Panamanian government charges the U.S. “highly unfair” fees for ships passing through the canal. Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino dismissed the suggestion.
Trump has feuded with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum after he threatened to impose a 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico in November. Sheinbaum, in a sharply worded letter to Trump responding to his tariff proposal, said “for every tariff, there will be a response in kind,” noting the potential economic consequences for U.S. auto manufacturers with presence in Mexico, according to multiple reports. “Migration and drug consumption in the United States cannot be addressed through threats or tariffs,” she wrote.
Why Does Trump Want To Buy Greenland? Here’s What To Know—As Don Jr. Arrives On Island. (Forbes)
Trump Says Canada Should Merge With U.S.—Trolling Trudeau As He Steps Down (Forbes)
Trump Says US Should Take Ownership Of Greenland And Threatens Panama Canal Takeover (Forbes)
Can Trump really rename the Gulf of Mexico? Comedian's old suggestion takes on new life
A liberal comedian's 15-year-old satirical suggestion to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America" has gotten a massive boost from President-elect Donald Trump.
Trump at a news conference on Tuesday said it would be a "beautiful name" for the body of water that's bordered to the north by the United States' southern coast, from Texas around to Florida. It also wraps around Mexico's Yucatan Penninsula.
A federal board has the power to rename geographic places within the United States, and Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene immediately promised to introduce a law to execute the plan. Those changes would not necessarily be binding on the states bordering the gulf or for other countries.
"We're going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring," Trump said. "The Gulf of America, what a beautiful name, and it's appropriate."
According to federal officials, over the last six centuries the gulf also been known as the Golfo de Nueva España (The Gulf of New Spain) and Mar Di Florida (the Florida Sea), among others, reflecting its long-contested history between France, Spain and other European countries as they colonized the New World.
The gulf's shoreline is about 3,540 miles, more than half of it bordering Mexico's coast, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, although that does not account for the myriad bays and inlets.
Trump's comments came in the context of discussing his plans to overturn new offshore oil-and-gas drilling restrictions approved by the exiting Biden administration.
Trump ‒ or any American ‒ can suggest a renaming. Under federal law, the U.S. government has a process by which it formally names and renames geographic features, from rivers and lakes to mountains. Overseen by the Board of Geographic Names, it happens more than you might think, and in recent years federal officials have been changing historic place names deemed offensive, particularly to Black and Native Americans.
States are not required to use the same names as the federal government, although they usually do.
"The BGN is responsible by law for standardizing geographic names throughout the federal government and discourages name changes unless there is a compelling reason," the Board of Geographic Names says on its website. "Further, changing an existing name merely to correct or re-establish historical usage should not be a primary reason to change a name."
In Colorado, both the state and the federal government agreed to change the name of one of the state's tallest mountains to Mount Blue Sky.
It was previously known as Mount Evans, but was renamed at the urging of Native American tribes upset it honored a former territorial governor who was connected to the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre. Reflecting a typical renaming process, the mountain was formally renamed by Colorado officials 2022, with federal officials following suit the next year.
There is a caveat: While the United States can change the name by which the gulf is known, other countries aren’t required to use it. Multiple international bodies help mediate those discrepancies, including the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names.
"As fundamental to the need for global standardization of geographical names, UNGEGN promotes the recording of locally-used names reflecting the languages and traditions of a country," the organization says on its website. "...Geographers, linguists, cartographers and planners are among those specialists who develop the tools, harness the technology, provide the outreach, and share the belief that accurate and consistent use of a common framework of geographical names can offer considerable benefits to the world."
Under normal circumstances, it takes at least six months to rename a place in the United States, according to the Board of Geographic Names. That allows time for consultation with states, tribes, mapmakers and other interested parties.
Greene in a post to X, formerly known as Twitter, released a draft of her proposed law, The Gulf of America Act of 2025 and urged Congress to pass it within 180 days.
"It's our gulf. The rightful name is the Gulf of America and it's what the entire world should refer to it as," she posted. "Congress has to take the Trump Agenda mandate seriously and that means acting fast to enact it."
This isn't the first time someone has suggested a name change.
In 2010, The Colbert Report host Steven Colbert created a "Gulf of America fund" to help clean up the gulf following the Deepwater Horizon spill that dumped 168 million gallons of oil across nearly 60,000 square miles of the Gulf.
"I don't think we can call it the Gulf of Mexico anymore," Colbert reportedly said in 2010. "We broke it, we bought it."
At the time, Colbert was the host of the satirical Comedy Central show. He's now the host of The Late Show on CBS, and a longtime Trump antagonist. The Colbert Report routinely mocked conservatives, including the kind of nationalism that Trump and his MAGA supporters espouse.
In 2012, former U.S. Rep. D. Stephen Holland of Mississippi proposed a name change as a joke to mock his Republican colleagues who he said seemed to want to push anything or anyone Mexican out of the state. That proposal never advanced.
For navigation purposes, consistency in naming is vital. That's why the federal government's Board on Geographic Names mandates that every federal agency use its database, known as the Geographic Names Information System. The federal system contains more than a million named places in the United States.
The United Nations group plays a similar role at the international level, along with the International Hydrographic Organization and the International Maritime Organization.
There's also a broader social conversation about names happening: Studies have shown that as European colonizers renamed geographic features around the world, it diminished and in some cases erased the history of indigenous people who had been living there first.
"Power was inscribed onto the landscape through place names which helped to generate a sense of belonging for the coloniser and, ultimately, was a tool for exerting control over social and physical environments," Beth Williamson of the University of London wrote in a 2023 study.
Gene Tucker, a history professor at Temple College in Texas, said changing place names often evokes unexpectedly emotional responses. He cited the 2023 renaming of the Army post in his hometown of Killeen, Texas, to Fort Cavazos, a change that still irks his parents.
"To rename a place, it hurts a lot of people's feelings," said Tucker, who did his PhD on Spanish-American place names and is a member of the Texas Map Society. "If you're changing the name of the place I grew up next to, you're changing my history and so you're changing me. It's like telling us that everything about us is wrong."
Many counties have ongoing disputes over shared geographical features, Tucker said, including China's contested claims in the Pacific. And the Rio Grande river on the southern border of the United States is known as the Rio Bravo in Mexico.
Tucker said that Mexico arguably has a stronger claim to naming the gulf since its shoreline is longer than the U.S. portion, but noted that the U.S. can call it pretty much whatever it wants.
"We could call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Trump but no one else would have to listen to us," he said, laughing.
Upon being told that the federal place-naming board traditionally prohibits naming places honoring someone until they've been dead for at least five years, he responded: "We could call it the Gulf of Texas then. That has a nice ring to it."
The mountain was controversially named for McKinley over the objections of many Alaska residents, and was renamed Denali within Alaska in 1975. Federal maps still called it McKinley until the Obama administration changed it to Denali in 2015.
Trump also recently suggested that he wanted to rename Alaska's Mount Denali to the name given to the country's tallest mountain by white Americans: Mount McKinley, which honored former President William McKinley.
Contributing: C. A. Bridges, USA TODAY NETWORK - Florida
Gulf of America? Trump says he'll change name of 'Gulf of Mexico'
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday that he plans to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
"We're going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Gulf of America -- what a beautiful name," he said at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. "And it's appropriate."
He did not specify when or how he intends to make the change, saying he would provide those details at a future date.
"We're going to change, because we do most of the work there, and it's ours," he said.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said immediately afterward in a social media post that she would introduce a bill to officially change the name of the body of water, which runs from Mexico along the southern part of the United States.
A former Mississippi legislator proposed legislation in 2012 to change the name of the body of water to the Gulf of America for "official purposes within the state of Mississippi." He said the bill was meant in jest.
It was not immediately clear why Trump decided to propose to change the name now. He told reporters the Gulf of America "has a beautiful ring" to it and was an "appropriate" name for the basin that also touches Cuba.
He indicated that he wanted to make the change because of a trade imbalance with Mexico, illegal immigration into the U.S. at the southern border and concerns about drugs coming into the United States.
