The Dictatorship
‘The Gulf of America’: Trump vows to rename the Gulf of Mexico
No one’s going to believe this, but a few years ago I started making some notes about a possible movie script about staffers at a fictional Republican White House. In the opening scene, I envisioned one aide making a spirited case for changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” while his colleagues rolled their eyes in exasperation.
My goal was to be satirical, to highlight an imagined conversation that might capture some of the more outlandish ideas that come up in GOP circles.
It never occurred to me that this could become an actual goal of Republican officials in reality. And yet, with 13 days remaining before Inauguration Day, Donald Trump has inadvertently stolen my ridiculous idea and vowed to pursue it as part of his second-term agenda. This was the message the Republican president-elect shared during his latest press conference at Mar-a-Lago:
We’re going to be announcing at a future date, pretty soon, we’re going to change — because we do most of the work there, and it’s ours — we’re going be changing — sort of the opposite of Biden, where he’s closing everything up, essentially getting rid of $50 to $60 trillion worth of assets — we’ll be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring. That covers a lot of territory. The Gulf of America: What a beautiful name. And it’s appropriate. It’s appropriate.”
As a video clip from the event makes clear, the incoming American president is not kidding.
As reports in The Daily Beast and The Hill noted, this large body of water has been called the Gulf of Mexico for roughly half a millennium. How, exactly, would Trump go about trying to rename it? I confess to knowing very little about international maritime law, though if the president-elect follows through on his latest promise, we’ll probably be hearing more soon enough about what’s possible.
But stepping back, it’s worth taking stock of the Republican’s increasingly bizarre foreign policy agenda as he prepares to return to the White House. Since Election Day, Trump has:
- leaned into the idea of adding Greenland to the United States;
- talked with increasing enthusiasm about adding Canada to the U.S. through some kind of unexplained “merger”;
- raised the prospect of the U.S. seizing control of the Panama Canal;
- and vowed to impose trade tariffs on each of the U.S.’ three largest trade partners.
What’s more, asked at his Mar-a-Lago event whether he can “assure the world” that he won’t “use military or economic coercion” toward Greenland and Panama, the incoming president declined.
“No, I can’t assure you on either of those two, but I can say this, we need them for economic security,” Trump replied.
As part of the same exchange, the Republican added, “It might be that you’ll have to do something.”
Inauguration Day is less than two weeks away. Buckle up.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”