Can Trump really rename the Gulf of Mexico? Why it could happen.

A liberal comedian’s 15-year-old satirical proposal to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” has received a massive boost from President-elect Donald Trump.

Trump said at a news conference on Tuesday that it was a “beautiful name” for the body of water that borders the southern coast of the United States from north Texas to Florida. It also extends around Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

A federal executive board has the authority to rename geographic locations within the United States, and Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene immediately vowed to introduce legislation to implement the plan. These changes would not necessarily be binding on Gulf states or other countries.

“We are going to change 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 fitting.”

According to federal officials, over the past six centuries, The Gulf is also known as the Golfo de Nueva España (Gulf of New Spain) and Mar Di Florida (Florida Sea), among other names, reflecting its long contentious history between France, Spain and other European countries in colonizing the New World.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Gulf’s coastline is approximately 3,540 miles long, more than half of which borders the coast of Mexico, although this does not take into account the countless bays and inlets.

Trump’s comments came as he discussed his plans to lift new restrictions on offshore oil and gas drilling approved by the outgoing Biden administration.

Can Trump rename the Gulf of Mexico?

Trump – or any American – can propose a renaming. Under federal law, the U.S. government has a process by which it officially names and renames geographic features, from rivers and lakes to mountains. Under the Board of Geographic Names’ oversight, it’s more common than you might think, and in recent years federal officials have changed historic place names that were considered offensive, particularly to Black and Native Americans.

States are not required to use the same names as the federal government, although they typically do.

“The BGN is legally responsible for standardizing geographic names across the federal government and discourages name changes unless there is a compelling reason,” the Board of Geographic Names website states. “Furthermore, changing an existing name simply to correct or restore historical usage should not be a primary reason for changing a name.”

In Colorado, both the state and federal government agreed to change the name of the state’s highest mountain to Mount Blue Sky.

It was formerly known as Mount Evans, but was renamed at the urging of Native American tribes because it honored a former territorial governor linked to the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. As part of a typical renaming process, the mountain was officially renamed by Colorado officials in 2022, and federal officials followed suit the following year.

There is one caveat: While the United States can change the name by which the Gulf is known, other countries are not required to use it. Several international bodies help resolve these disagreements, including the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names.

“UNGEGN promotes the recording of locally used names that reflect a country’s languages and traditions, as it is fundamental to the need for global standardization of geographical names,” it says on its website. “…geographers, linguists, cartographers and planners are among the specialists who develop the tools, use the technology, provide the outreach and share the belief that the accurate and consistent use of a common framework of geographical names provides significant benefits to the region can world.”

How quickly could the Gulf of Mexico be renamed?

According to the Board of Geographic Names, under normal circumstances it takes at least six months to rename a place in the United States. This allows time for consultations with states, tribes, mapmakers and other interested parties.

Greene posted a draft of her proposed legislation, the Gulf of America Act of 2025, in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, and called on Congress to pass it within 180 days.

“It’s our golf. The correct name is the Gulf of America and the whole world should call it that,” she posted. “Congress must take the mandate of the Trump agenda seriously and that means acting quickly to implement it.”

Where did the idea of renaming the Golf come from?

This isn’t the first time someone has suggested a name change.

In 2010, Colbert Report host Steven Colbert established a “Gulf of America Fund” to help clean up the Gulf after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which spilled 168 million gallons of oil over nearly 60,000 square miles of the Gulf were distributed.

“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 hosting the satirical Comedy Central show. Today he is the host of “The Late Show” on CBS and a long-time Trump opponent. The Colbert Report regularly 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 every Mexican out of the state. This proposal never moved forward.

What are the risks of renaming places?

For navigation purposes, consistent naming is critical. For this reason, the federal government’s Board on Geographic Names requires every federal agency to use its database, called the Geographic Names Information System. The federal GNIS contains more than one million named places in the United States.

At the international level, the United Nations Group plays a similar role alongside the International Hydrographic Organization and the International Maritime Organization.

There’s also a broader societal discussion about names: Studies have shown that the renaming of geographical features by European colonizers around the world diminished and in some cases erased the history of the indigenous peoples who first lived there.

“Power was inscribed on the landscape through place names, which helped create a sense of belonging in the colonizer and was ultimately a tool for control over social and physical environments,” wrote Beth Williamson of the University of London in a 2023 study.

Gene Tucker, a history professor at Temple College in Texas, said changing place names often provokes unexpectedly emotional reactions. He pointed to the 2023 renaming of the Army post in his hometown of Killeen, Texas, to Fort Cavazos, a change that still angers his parents.

“Renaming a place hurts a lot of people’s feelings,” said Tucker, who earned his doctorate on Spanish-American place names and is a member of the Texas Map Society. “If you change the name of the place where I grew up, you change my story and therefore me. It’s like we’re being told everything about us is wrong.”

In many counties, there are ongoing disputes over shared geographic features, including China’s disputed claims in the Pacific, Tucker said. And the Rio Grande on the southern border of the United States is known in Mexico as the Rio Bravo.

Tucker said Mexico probably has a stronger claim to the Gulf’s naming because its coastline is longer than the U.S. portion, but noted that the U.S. can give it pretty much whatever it wants.

“We could call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Trump, but otherwise no one would have to listen to us,” he said with a laugh.

When told that the federal place-naming board traditionally prohibits naming places in a person’s honor until that person has been dead for at least five years, he replied, “Then we could call it the Gulf of Texas.” “It has a nice ring to it.”

What happened to Mount Denali?

The mountain was controversially named after McKinley over the objections of many Alaska residents and was renamed Denali in Alaska in 1975. Federal maps still called it McKinley until the Obama administration changed it to Denali in 2015.

Trump also recently suggested renaming Alaska’s Mount Denali with the name given by white Americans to the country’s tallest mountain: Mount McKinley, which honors former President William McKinley.

Contributor: CA Bridges, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida

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Can Trump really rename the Gulf of Mexico? Why it could happen.

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