Introducing Gulf of America – from the person who gave us Trump Tower

Environment Brief #178 | By: Todd J. Broadman | March 26, 2025

Featured Photo by Guide of the World

For the last 475 years, the expanse of ocean from western Florida to southern Texas has been called the “Gulf of Mexico.” English geographer Richard Hakluyt referred to the “Gulfe of Mexico” in his work of 1589. With the stroke of a pen on February 9, 2025, the President of the United States signed Executive Order 14172 and renamed the body of water “Gulf of America.” In addition to “restoring American pride,” President Trump justified the name change by referencing territorial rights over much of the area and that those waters have “long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America.” Trump considers the Gulf a business asset.

Back in 2010, comedian Stephen Colbert offered the initial suggestion of a name change in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf saying that “I don’t think we can call it the Gulf of Mexico anymore. We broke it, we bought it.” He joked that a “Gulf of America fund” be initiated to help fund cleanup.

The name of the highest peak in North America for close to 1000 years had been called Denali by the native Athabaskan people. Denali means “the great one.” 120 years ago, a gold prospector named William Dickey, saw the great 20,310-foot mountain and named it McKinley after the then Republican presidential nominee and then Congress codified the moniker along with land designated as the McKinley National Park. In returning the mountain and National Park to their original Native names in 2015, President Barack Obama reflected that McKinley had “never set foot in Alaska.” Regardless of McKinley’s distant relationship to that significant landmark, President Trump, in one of the first acts on his return to the White House, issued an executive order restoring McKinley as the mountain’s official name. (The national park that surrounds it will remain Denali National Park).

In the minds of Americans, where symbols take on meanings, these name changes are intended to deliver potent messages. With the names Mexico and Denali which connote America’s historical embrace of plurality, the new administration is communicating that it is symbolically important to supplant that value with non-Native, non-foreign elements. Naming conventions in this sense are intended to reinforce American superiority both in ethical and subtle racial contexts. These tacit assumptions do make their way through to the public. As Nicole Hassenstab of American University explains, this is “a way to assert civilizational identities by selectively and symbolically valorizing certain historical heritages over others.”

There is the assumption that to name a thing you must first have knowledge of it. This knowledge conveys an interpretive authority. The renaming of Ayers Rock in Australia to its original Uluru or the city of Bombay back to Mumbai follows this line of reasoning, and is why the recent name changes imposed by Trump do not.

Following the executive order, Google made the decision to change the name on its widely used maps application. Many major media outlets refused to adopt the new moniker – at some cost. Associated Press (AP), the independent global news organization, chose to stay with the name Gulf of Mexico based on a uniformity of style and was promptly barred from the White House press corps. AP has sued and claimed that “it is essential in a democracy for the public to have access to news about their government from an independent, free press.” AP and other major news outlets see the move as a constitutional threat.

Amongst other news organizations adoption, as expected, follows editorial bias. Fox News and Breitbart enthusiastically made the switch to Gulf of America, as did Yellowhammer and 1819 News. Reuters and the New York Times line-up with AP. The Times explained that the gulf “is an international body of water that has been known as the Gulf of Mexico for several hundred years. We will continue to follow common usage in updating our style guidance like we have done in the past with other areas of the world.”

ANALYSIS

President Trump’s initiative for these symbolic changes is a personal one and is consistent with the naming of his business entities to build the Trump brand. Authoritarian leaders see this process “as a tool for constructing new notions of national identity and promoting certain historical narratives while denying, suppressing, or erasing others.” The historical narrative does not suit President Trump. That story begins in the 1550s with the Aztec culture and their named land Mexica and extended to the Gulf when early Europeans began mapping the area. The Gulf of Mexico was established as a maritime reference with the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) for about five centuries.

When AP executive editor Julie Pace  made clear that the White House’s decision to bar them from the Oval Office is a First Amendment violation, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insists that the Gulf of America is a “fact” and pretends there is no reasonable explanation “why news outlets don’t want to call it that but that is what it is.” In AP’s defense, the White House Correspondents Association added that there was an undercurrent of revenge in that the administration “publicly admitted they are restricting access to events to punish a news outlet for not advancing the government’s preferred language.”

Also lined-up in AP’s defense are Reuters, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. The latter justified their stance saying “the body of water is not solely within the United States’ jurisdiction and the name Gulf of America might confuse global readers.” The United Kingdom was typical of others in the international community in stating that they will not be using the name Gulf of America unless and until it becomes the common name across the English-speaking world, adding that Trump lacks the authority to make that change. USA Today/Gannett took a unique position planning to walk the fence-line between both terms: the “more common” Gulf of Mexico and the one used by the U.S. government. In a sampling of registered U.S. voters, the gauge of popular sentiment – according to Harvard CAPS, Harris Poll, and Marquette University – towards the change indicates that three-quarters of voters oppose the new moniker.

In summary, there is very little support to legitimize the Gulf of America from bodies within the U.S. and international bodies. The Trump administration made this move without  diplomatic consultation of Mexico, Cuba, and other Mesoamerican and Caribbean countries who are directly implicated. The administration also failed to evaluate the impacts for the entire education field, public and private.

One wonders if the Gulf of America was chosen as a compromise over a preference for the Gulf of Trump. Is Mount McKinley but a brief segue to Mount Trump? The history in this regard is instructive: McKinley was first summited by Hudson Struck in 1913 and shortly thereafter Struck reflected on “a certain ruthless arrogance” that “contemptuously ignores the native names of conspicuous natural objects.” Which is another way of saying that packed into a name ought to be a deeper connection to a people, as well as the seldom seen trait in this current administration: humility.

Engagement Resources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org  benefits readers by presenting information on all branches of knowledge. Hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia consists of freely editable content.
• https://apnews.com/ founded as an independent news cooperative, whose members are U.S. newspapers and broadcasters, steadfast in our mission to inform the world.
• https://www.offshore-mag.com/ is a leading source of timely, actionable and relevant news and technical content for the offshore oil, gas and renewable energy industries.