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 press 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 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.
Can Trump rename the Gulf of Mexico?
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 the state’s tallest mountain 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.”
How fast could the Gulf of Mexico be renamed?
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.”
Where did this idea to rename the Gulf come from?
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 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.
What are the risks in renaming places?
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 GNIS 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.”
What happened with Mount Denali?
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
