During a long and rambling speech about his plans to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada and take back the Panama Canal, President-elect Donald Trump mentioned, in passing, his plans to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
“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 — 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,” he said in a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, his first since his 2024 victory was certified by a joint session of Congress Monday.
“And it’s appropriate,” he said. “It’s appropriate.”
While he did not provide a deadline, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said immediately afterward in a social media post that she would introduce a bill to officially change the name of the body of water, which runs from Mexico along the southern part of the United States.
Can Trump do this?
What is the Gulf of Mexico?
More than half of Florida’s coast borders the Gulf of Mexico, a partially landlocked body of water between the United States and Mexico that links ports in five Southern states and Mexico with the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean with two passages — called the Florida Straits — on either side of Cuba and the Yucatan Channel between Mexico and Cuba. The Gulf has an average depth of 5,300 feet.
The Gulf mainland shore runs more than 4,000 miles from the Florida Keys to Cabo Catoche on the Yucatán Peninsula.
Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas all share the coast, along with 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 it. In 2012, former U.S. Rep. D. Stephen Holland of Mississippi proposed a bill to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America.” But he
meant it as a joke, to mock his Republican colleagues he said seemed to want to push anything or anyone Mexican out of the state.
Two years previously, when he was on The Colbert Report, Steven Colbert created a “Gulf of America fund to help clean up after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster dumped 210 million gallons across nearly 60,000 square miles of the Gulf over a period of four months 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 Trump could do it. Landmarks have been renamed before.
In 2015, former President Barack Obama approved the Department of the Interior’s order to rename Mount McKinley in Alaska to Denali, a local Athabascan name for the mountain that President McKinley never visited. (A move Trump also has vowed to overturn.)
But while he might be able to change the name for all U.S. references, it would remain to be seen if he could get any other countries to go along with it.
Who named the Gulf of Mexico?
While existing residents obviously knew about it, the first European to find the Gulf was Sebastián de Ocampo in 1508-1509, according to the
Texas State Historical Association. It remained unnamed until the early 1540s, considered part of the “North Sea” (Atlantic Ocean). One map dated 1584 called it “Mare de Nort,” or “Sea of the North.”
Baptiste Boazio, the illustrator and map maker of Francis Drake’s Caribbean cruise of attacks in the 1580s, used “Gulf of Mexico” on his map “View of Entire Route of Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage.” A 1630 map called the body of water “Gulf of New Spain.”
The Spanish name evolved into Seno Mexicano. “Seno” means “gulf” or “bay.” It has also been called Golfo de Nueva España and Golfo de México on various maps and documents, and there are at least 32 different versions of the name in different languages and dialects, according to the
United States Geological Survey
.
Francesca Chambers, USA TODAY contributed to this story.
