On the day of his second inauguration Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14172, “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness”, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”. Alaska’s highest mountain, Denali, reverted to being Mount McKinley, the old Koyukon native name giving way to a US president whose tariff and expansionist policies Trump admires.
Now Lake Ontario will become Lake America, at least in US-controlled territories. But not in Canada, which straddles the lake and is the target of Trump’s latest trade war. Prime minister Mark Carney categorically rejects this “hydronymic” assault.
“We have a gulf and we have a lake – now all we need is an ocean. Maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific,” Trump told reporters. Was it a joke? He probably doesn’t even know himself.
The narcissistic Trump has made renaming institutions, places, and government services such as passports and park passes, most often with his own name, into a bizarre feature of his extraordinary presidency. Museums like the Smithsonian have been ordered to rewrite exhibition captions to conform to his US historical exceptionalism.
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Litigation is ongoing over attempts to put his name on the Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts, and both Penn Station and Dulles International Airport. The latter two faced threats of funding cuts unless Democratic politicians complied with his wishes. The US Institute of Peace has become the Donald J Trump US Institute of Peace. The Department of Defence is now the Department of War. A new fleet of proposed navy warships will be “Trump-class”.
It’s a safe assumption that most of Trump’s re-naming initiatives will be undone after his miserable presidency stumbles to a close. The generation that follows him, not Trump himself, will decide how he is to be remembered. In 2008, the people of California were asked to vote in a referendum on a proposal to rename a local sewage plant after George W Bush.
