Can Trump really rename the Gulf of Mexico?

During a long and rambling speech about his plans to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada and retake the Panama Canal, President-elect Donald Trump casually mentioned his plans to rename the Gulf of Mexico.

“We’re going to change – sort of the opposite of Biden, where he’s shutting everything down and essentially getting rid of $50 trillion to $60 trillion worth of assets – we’re going to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring that covers a large area, the Gulf of America, what a beautiful name,” he said in a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, his first victory since his victory in the 2024 joint session of Congress Monday .

“And it’s appropriate,” he said. “It’s appropriate.”

Although he didn’t give a deadline, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said in a social media post immediately afterward that she would introduce a bill to officially change the name of the body of water that runs from Mexico through the southern part of the United States .

Can Trump do that?

What is the Gulf of Mexico?

More than half of Florida’s coast borders the Gulf of Mexico, a partially inland body of water between the United States and Mexico that connects ports in five southern states and Mexico to the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean via two passages – the Florida Strait. on both sides of Cuba and the Yucatan Canal between Mexico and Cuba. The Gulf has an average depth of 5,300 feet.

The Gulf’s mainland coastline stretches more than 4,000 miles from the Florida Keys to Cabo Catoche on the Yucatán Peninsula.

Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas share the coast, as do the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Vera Cruz, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo.

Can Trump change the name of the Gulf of Mexico?

He’s not the first to suggest this. In 2012, former U.S. Representative D. Stephen Holland of Mississippi proposed a bill to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” But he meant it as a joke, to mock his Republican colleagues, who he said wanted to drive every Mexican out of the state.

Two years earlier, while contributing to The Colbert Report, Steven Colbert founded a Gulf of America Fund to help with the cleanup after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill spilled 210 million gallons over four months over nearly 60,000 square miles of the Gulf were dumped in 2010.

“I don’t think we can call it the Gulf of Mexico anymore,” he said at the time. “We broke it, we bought it.”

However, it is possible that Trump could pull it off. Sights have already been renamed.

In 2015, former President Barack Obama approved the Interior Department’s order to rename Alaska’s Mount McKinley to Denali, a local Athabascan name for the mountain that President McKinley never visited. (A move Trump also wanted to reverse.)

But while he might succeed in changing the name for all US references, it remains to be seen whether he will be able to persuade other countries to join in.

Who named the Gulf of Mexico?

While existing residents obviously knew about it, Sebastián de Ocampo was the first European to discover the Gulf in 1508-1509, according to the Texas State Historical Association. It remained unnamed until the early 1540s and was considered part of the “North Sea” (Atlantic Ocean). A map from 1584 called it “Mare de Nort,” or “Sea of the North.”

Baptiste Boazio, the illustrator and map maker of Francis Drake’s Caribbean raiding cruise in the 1580s, used “Gulf of Mexico” on his map “View of the Entire Route of Sir Francis Drake’s Voyage of the West Indies.” A map from 1630 called the body of water the “Gulf of New Spain.”

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Can Trump really rename the Gulf of Mexico?

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