The Patriot Post® · A Pox on Both Sides in the 'Gulf of America' Brawl

As a conservative by temperament and outlook, I incline to the principle that where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change¹. So my instinct was to sympathize with those who bristled at President Trump’s gratuitous executive order² renaming “the area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico” as the “Gulf of America.” If ever there were an instance of something it was not necessary to change, it was the noncontroversial 400-year-old name of an international body of water.

Of course Trump doesn’t issue such directives because of necessity. He issues them to indulge his own idiosyncratic whims, and to force those who don’t like it to lump it. Republicans went along with the “Gulf of America” change³ without a murmur; some, like Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, complied even before Trump gave the order⁴. Much of the corporate world quickly fell in line⁵; after a brief hesitation, Apple Maps and Google Maps⁶ did as well.

But when the Associated Press declined to make the change⁷ — on the grounds that, as a news agency with a global audience, it “must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences” — the White House lashed out. It banned AP reporters⁸ from the Oval Office, Air Force One, and presidential events. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, justifying the reprisal⁹, baldly accused the AP of promoting “lies” and denying facts. “It is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America, and I am not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that,” she said.

Such Trumpian gaslighting is both infuriating and typical. It is also drenched with hypocrisy: Just three days after taking office, the president proclaimed¹⁰, “No longer will our government label the speech of our own citizens as misinformation or disinformation.” But let a news service decline to salute Trump’s abrupt renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, and his spokeswoman charges it with promoting “lies.”

All the same, what is it that the AP — and those supporting its stand, including the White House Correspondents’ Association, The New York Times¹¹, and The Washington Post¹² — really objects to? Is it the unilateral change of name? Or is it the name changer?

After all, place names are revised all the time to accommodate political agendas, and legacy media organizations routinely adjust to the new nomenclature.

In June 2020, the mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser, changed the name of a two-block stretch of 16th Street NW facing the White House to “Black Lives Matter Plaza¹³.” As The Washington Post reported, the new name was “painted on the asphalt in massive yellow letters” in order to send an explicit message of political opposition to Trump, who was then president. The Post subsequently used the name routinely¹⁴ in its news coverage, as did the AP¹⁵ and The Times¹⁶.

In recent years, numerous military installations, highways, and other places named for Confederate generals and politicians have been changed so that they no longer honor the vilest cause in American history. Traditional news outlets such as the AP¹⁷ readily went along with the renaming. As they had earlier when Cape Canaveral in Florida¹⁸ was changed to Cape Kennedy — and then, a decade later, changed back again. Or when former president Barack Obama changed the name of Alaska’s Mount McKinley to Denali¹⁹ in 2015 (Trump has now changed it back). Or when President George H.W. Bush ordered Custer Battlefield National Monument in Montana to be renamed “Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.”

“News organizations routinely change how they refer to places, and many of these decisions carry the whiff of politics,” Gilad Edelman remarked in The Atlantic²⁰ last week. When the AP announced in 2019²¹ that it would henceforth use “Kyiv,” not “Kiev,” to refer to the Ukrainian capital, it said it was doing so “in line with the Ukrainian government’s preferred name.” In similar fashion, US media outlets dutifully altered Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City, Burma to Myanmar, and Bombay to Mumbai. So why draw a line in the sand over “Gulf of America”?

Here in Boston, the Globe and other news outlets instantly accepted “Nubian Square” as the new name for Roxbury’s Dudley Square — even though voters rejected the proposal²² in a citywide ballot question. There was considerable opposition²³ in 2018 to renaming Yawkey Way²⁴, the street that runs in front of Fenway Park, but once the change was pushed through, there was no media resistance.

When all is said and done, Trump’s order to rename the Gulf of Mexico wasn’t about refreshing a longstanding tradition but about engaging in swaggering for its own sake. The AP may claim its refusal to adopt “Gulf of America” is driven by a commitment to clarity, but it is really just choosing sides in our polarized climate. A pox on them both.