In order to demonstrate his intense disapproval of the idea of needlessly renaming things for stupid political purposes. Donald Trump has just… needlessly renamed things for stupid political purposes.

Amongst the blizzard of Executive Orders Trump issued on his very first day in office was one called “RESTORING NAMES THAT HONOR AMERICAN GREATNESS”. Note that word “RESTORING” there, in big fat capital letters. This implies Trump was just giving things back their true names, which had been altered or obscured under Year Zero Democrat rule during the Biden and Obama regimes before him. The Executive Order’s reasoning ran thus:

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Denial is a river in Egypt, Denali is a mountain in Alaska

Although there was no actual association between McKinley and the area, the name stuck and was officially adopted by the US Government for the peak in 1917. Kokuyon Indians were still free to keep on calling it Denali, but officially it was now Mount McKinley, a name used unthinkingly by most. In 2015, however, ever-eager to pander to the anti-colonialist caucus, Democratic President Barack Obama self-righteously intervened to decree its name should henceforth “return” to being Denali, a name it had never actually legally borne at all.

As McKinley, like Trump himself, was a bigly fine fan of the concept of international trade tariffs, known as “The Napoleon of Protection[ism]”, in 2024 Donald took belated exception to Obama’s unnecessary virtue-signalling measure, and decided to signal to his Republican electorate the precise reverse political message: that, from now on, America’s past was no longer going to be sycophantically rewritten from the sole perspective of the contemporary Left in order to trash its history as a worthless nation led by nothing but white supremacists.

In 2022, Scientific American ran a piece in support of the Democrats’ wider recent mass renaming of various toponyms (the technical term for place-names) along similar “racial justice”-related lines, making specific disapproving reference to what they saw as being President McKinley’s past as a mass murdering, colonialist evil-doer:

“Under President McKinley, the U.S. annexed Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Filipinos revolted, and the war McKinley waged against them claimed the lives of about 5,000 Americans and 200,000 Filipinos. This was the namesake for our continent’s tallest mountain.”

How many people have died and been conquered in the name of Islam down the centuries? Significantly more than 205,000, I would imagine. Would Scientific American therefore like to publicly recommend Islamabad be rechristened as something less potentially triggering to all the many victims of Islamic colonisation down the centuries too, then? No, because the Muslims were the wrong colour colonisers.

Once you start with this kind of thing, there’s no end to it. Even America itself was named after a white colonialist, of sorts, in shape of the Italian navigator and explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Shouldn’t Scientific American rename itself too, then, in order to avoid the Indigenous descendants of all those squaws and braves later dispossessed and murdered by the invading pale-skins?

There is currently a Native Indian campaign to rechristen America wholesale as “Turtle Island”, because that is what certain tribes once called the place. But, then again, certain other tribes didn’t call the place this, so to rename the USA after said marine reptile would just create further problems, seeming as it would to privilege certain Indians’ nomenclature over that of others. Plus, Scientific Turtle Islander just sounds too much of a mouthful.

It’s debatable how widely many such official renamings of toponyms are obeyed by the general public in any case. In 2022, authorities in Wales mandated that the country’s tallest peak, known as Mount Snowdon for centuries, after Anglo-Saxon words meaning something like “Snow-Dune”, was to become legally known as Yr Wyddfa instead, a native Welsh term for the place dating back to 1284. The fact that the English name was provably older, being traceable back to 1095, mattered not; it was still an absolutely essential “anti-colonial” measure, preached the local National Park Authority. But, in spite of their official ordinance, how many people worldwide actually call it Yr Wyddfa instead of Mount Snowdon? Basically just employees of the Welsh Tourist Board. Do you still call Burma Burma, or Myanmar? Or Ireland Ireland, or Eire? Personally, I’m so old-fashioned as to still think of Iraq as being Mesopotamia.

A Gulf in understanding

In and of itself, I think Trump was well within his rights to pursue this specific act of renaming, on the grounds that Obama’s initial act of doing so back in 2015 was wholly unnecessary, being a complete waste of Federal time, effort and money. So is Trump subsequently renaming Denali as Mount McKinley, some would argue, but, on its own terms, it could have stood as a valuable signal to the Democrats that “If you engage in needless culture war tactics of rewriting history like this against our side, then as soon as we get back in power, the Republicans will only start changing such names right back again under MAGA leadership, so please save us all the bother next time you win and leave things as they are, and we’ll extend the same courtesy to you.”

Then, his point made, Trump could have graciously refrained from replacing any other well-known and age-old names for things for spurious political gain, in order to appear the bigger and better man. Instead, in the very same Executive Order, he immediately went ahead and ludicrously ordered the Gulf of Mexico be rechristened as the Gulf of America instead:

“The area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America. The Gulf was a crucial artery for America’s early trade and global commerce. It is the largest gulf in the world, and the United States coastline along this remarkable body of water spans over 1,700 miles and contains nearly 160 million acres. Its natural resources and wildlife remain central to America’s economy today … and in recognition of this flourishing economic resource and its critical importance to our Nation’s economy and its people, I am directing that it officially be renamed the Gulf of America.”

Instantly, the moral high ground was now lost. As President, Trump does actually have the legal right to do this – at least from a purely domestic perspective. He can grandiosely mandate that Federal departments burn dollars and time reprinting maps and updating databases to fit in with his fantasy if he really wants, but next to nobody else across the rest of the world, including America’s closest allies like the United Kingdom, appear to have any intention of going along with him in this. When he sits behind his desk in his DOGE Department Of Government Efficiency, one of the first needless, money-eating schemes Trump’s new anti-waste tsar Elon Musk should scrap is surely this one. Then again, Musk equally meaninglessly renamed Twitter as X, so has poor form in this area himself.

Renaming the Gulf just makes The Donald look like a grandiose megalomaniac, akin to when President Xi goes around the world bullying smaller nations into not calling Taiwan Taiwan on their own maps, so as to back up their own claims to the island’s ownership. As Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo joked, Trump’s rechristening of the Gulf meant that henceforth her own nation should begin referring to the USA itself as “Mexican America”.

I am unavoidably reminded of David Foster Wallace’s satirical 1996 novel Infinite Jest, in which the USA, Mexico and Canada have all been forcibly united into one grand continental mega-state at the behest of an insane entertainment-star-turned-politician President, just as certain MAGA supporters, and Trump himself, have half-jokingly floated. The mega-state in question was called Organization of North American Nations – or ONAN, because its proponents and architects were all a bunch of total ONANists, both literally and figuratively.

The English language has no genders

The most egregious attempt at falsely renaming things for ideological purposes against all known prior laws of reality under Democrat rule in recent years, of course, was their efforts to call people with penises “women”, and people with vaginas “men” by sheer force of law and Federal diktat; one of President Biden’s own first day Executive Orders was to replace the word “sex” with “gender identity” in various pieces of Federal legislation. Another Executive Order repealing such Biden-era abuses of linguistic relabelling just signed into law by Trump was called “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT”, which does precisely what it says on the tin.

Trump could very effectively have rhetorically packaged this alongside his “RESTORING NAMES THAT HONOR AMERICAN GREATNESS” Order, along the following lines: “Just as Mount McKinley is now being called Mount McKinley once again, so a man is being called a man, and a woman is being called a woman, once more. The Republicans are the Party of reality; the Democrats the Party of lies. No more FAKE relabelling of FACT from us!”

Instead, by forcibly transitioning the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, Trump somewhat undoes such good work through sheer hubris. Next time the Democrats win, they will obviously just change the Gulf’s name straight back again, and could easily use this as rhetorical justification for equally instantaneously rechristening what men and women are too, on Trump’s own terms but reversed: “Just as the Gulf of Mexico IS the Gulf of Mexico, so trans women ARE women!” Every change of future US President, are the labels within America’s Geography and Biology textbooks alike each due to be remade according to which Party he or she represents?

Earlier in January, the US House of Representatives passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, preventing men who delusionally claim to be women from competing in female arenas. All but two Democrats opposed the Bill, deciding to arbitrarily rechristen it “The Child Predator Empowerment Act” instead, on the mad grounds that it would supposedly enable a new cadre of “Taliban-like” genital-inspectors to peer down inside kids’ underwear to ensure they didn’t have the wrong bits lurking down there, prior to every school sports lesson.

Maybe, next time the Dems win, they really will officially rename said Bill “The Child Predator Empowerment Act”, before then immediately repealing it? Trouble is, allowing teenage boys into teenage girls’ changing rooms by its very definition acts to empower child predators, meaning the Republicans could legitimately then rechristen the Democrats’ own replacement Bill as “The Child Predator Empowerment Act” in their turn, before then later … well, you can see where I’m going with this.

As the very fact the Democrats wanted to arbitrarily redefine the meanings of the terms “male” and “female” shows, the Orwellian abuse of language that can be employed in renaming things for no good reason is a clear and present signal of potential political overreach. After the French Revolution, the very names of the calendar months were hyperbolically transformed into things like Brumaire (“Misty Month”), Frimaire (“Frosty Month”) and Nivose (“Snowy Month”); across the Channel in non-revolutionary Britain, sceptics satirically rechristened them Wheezy, Sneezy and Freezy, like early Seven Dwarfs. Even worse, the former dictator of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, once rechristened not only a month of the year, but the Turkmen word for “bread”, after his beloved dead mother, Gurbansoltan; hungry and humiliated citizens literally had to ask in shops for “A loaf of Gurbansoltan, please,” at least in theory.

So, Donald Drumpf (his original Germanic family name before it became Anglicised following the clan’s immigration to America) has a fair way left to fall yet in relation to such matters. If at any point he finally gets around to following through on his recent threat to forcibly annex Greenland, before then suddenly renaming the place Orangeland, we’ll know that power has truly gone to his head.