US President Donald Trump joked this Tuesday that he still has “time” to name the Gulf of Mexico after him, renamed ‘Gulf of the United States’ upon his return to the White House a year ago, insisting that his team does not reject almost any of his ideas.
“I was going to call it Trump’s Gulf, but I thought they would kill me if I did that. I wanted to do it. (…) Trump’s Gulf sounds good anyway, maybe we can do it. We still have time,” he said at a press conference to highlight the achievements of the first year of his second term.
The president warned that he was not serious to the journalists gathered in the crowded Press Room of the executive residence. “I’m joking, you know, when I say that. I wasn’t going to call it Trump’s Gulf, because tomorrow I can already see the headlines: ‘Trump wanted to name it Trump’s Gulf, but was rejected by his team.'”
“My people don’t contradict me too much,” he added.
During his speech before the press, Trump defended the renaming of the geographical feature because, as he said, the United States “has 92% of the coast” of the Gulf, an incorrect statement regardless of the calculation used to establish how much coastline each of the many countries located in the Gulf has.
“It always bothered me. I would say we have most of the coast. Mexico has a small percentage. They talk about 8%, but we have 92%, and I said to myself: ‘Why? Why is it the Gulf of Mexico? It should be the Gulf of the United States,'” he added.
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Trump made the name change official with an executive order signed on January 20, 2025, in which he instructed to use ‘Gulf of America’ or ‘gulf of the United States’ in federal documents.
The change was received with divided opinions: its base celebrated it as another example of “American superiority in the region,” while it sparked rejection among several Latin American countries, especially Mexico, where it is still called by its original name.
After the update of the official registry of place names in the US, the Google Maps service was the first to adopt the new name for users within the country, followed by Apple Maps and Bing.
On the other hand, media outlets such as the Associated Press announced that they would continue using ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in their reporting, mentioning the new nomenclature of ‘Gulf of the United States’ as a secondary reference.
Because of this, the White House banned the news agency from covering several presidential events, prompting the AP to sue the Administration. A judge ruled in favor of the outlet, but the Republican government appealed and the case is still in litigation.
With information from EFE
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