President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday vowed to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”
“We’re going to be announcing 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 to 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,” the incoming president said at an unrelated news conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. “We’re going to 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.”
While the International Hydrographic Organization names Earth’s bodies of waters, some countries use different names. For example, while the U.S. has used the name Rio Grande to designate the river between Texas and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas, Mexico calls it the Rio Bravo.
Trump in recent weeks has pushed to remake the maps of North America, arguing Canada and Greenland, as well as the Panama Canal, should belong to the United States — and threatening military force to do so in his Tuesday remarks.
