Trump keeps score with Gulf of America word games
Names are tricky things.
What was the federal holiday at the start of this week? Most people say “Presidents Day,” but there is no such animal. The real name is “George Washington’s Birthday.”
But Monday was not his birthday. Washington was born on Feb. 22, an occasion marked in the early republic by public readings of his farewell address and other expressions of decorous patriotism. Like a lot of things, though, the Civil War changed how America dealt with such matters.
After Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and subsequent apotheosis as a civic saint, many people began to celebrate his birthday — 10 days before Washington’s — as well. But as you might imagine, not many folks in the former Confederacy were eager to acclaim the great emancipator. So the country continued on in that way for a bit: All states celebrating Washington, some states celebrating Lincoln.
In 1879, though, Congress was looking for a more formal arrangement and established Washington’s birthday as a holiday for federal workers and for the District of Columbia. But the split persisted. Some Republican states maintained holidays for both great leaders, while Democratic ones mostly continued to snub Lincoln.
This was not good enough for the Yankees, who wanted attention to be paid. They would make noise about pushing Feb. 12 as a federal holiday, but Democrats were not having any of it. The pro-Lincoln-ists then took another tact and pushed for the establishment of a Presidents Day holiday to celebrate all presidents — wink, wink — and eventually got a bill before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1951, but Democrats killed it deader than old Abe himself.
Also, Presidents Day is a pretty foolish idea. That’s the “everybody gets a trophy” approach to history. You don’t set good examples when you put John Tyler and James Buchanan on the same page as Lincoln and Washington. And neither should the office of the presidency be any further adulated than it is. The presidency is a dangerous necessity required to avoid even greater threats. It is only a blessing because the presidency is preferable to the alternatives: hereditary monarchy on the one hand and chaos on the other.
We started monkeying with presidential holidays again in the late 1960s, as lawmakers looked for a way to standardize the calendar for federal workers and maximize the number of three-day weekends for “both the spiritual and economic life of the Nation,” i.e., more sales, more pleasure trips, etc.
In 1968, Washington’s Birthday was fixed on the third Monday in February and has ever been thus. But, of course, car dealers, mattress salespeople, and local officials are hardly bound by what the feds call their holiday. To get around the regional differences and calendric confusion, it became easier for many to just call it Presidents Day and be done with it.
Crusading holiday enthusiast Harold Stonebridge Fischer failed in his 1951 bid for an official Presidents Day, but commerce and convention did for him what Congress could not and popularized the term. That leaves it up to individuals to decide. You could do as I do and annoyingly correct people who say “Presidents Day” and treat them to a whole stemwinder on the virtues of Washington and Lincoln. Or you could just be cool, know what they mean and not make a whole thing out of it.
So what do you call the body of water bounded by the United States and Mexico that ends somewhere out by Cuba? The answer is currently even less clear than the boundary between that body and the Caribbean Sea, which itself actually seems to really just be part of the Atlantic Ocean.
President Trump has ordered federal agencies to refer to that body as the Gulf of America, so that is how the people and agencies at his command will describe it. But the European name handed down for 400 years, since the age of the Conquistadors, was "Golfo de México" for the land of Mexica, the rules of the Aztec Empire.
The Aztec name, "Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl," didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so maybe it’s understandable that after a little experimentation — Gulf of Cortés, Yucatán Sea, Gulf of New Spain, etc. — Europeans settled on the Gulf of Mexico. But that didn’t happen all at once, because, much to the dismay of the Spanish of old, no one owns the gulf. Its eastern boundary is subjective and all around it have been claimants for access, navigation and trade.
Like the prideful Spanairds of the 16th century, Trump wants to have the gulf for himself. One suspects that he won’t have any better luck than they did, but at least as far as what his government calls the thing, he can have his way. There’s no legal status beyond that, but presidents are funny about these things. If Jimmy Carter tried to get Americans to start using the metric system, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that Trump wants a rebranding.
Every morning, if he likes, Trump can call up the U.S. Geological Survey and ask, “What’s the name for the body of water between Texas and Florida?” and smile sweetly when they say, “Gulf of America, sir.” But, of course, it doesn’t do much beyond that. Other countries don’t even call our country the United States of America. But what can we do about the Germans’ Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika when we don’t even call their country by its proper name, Deutschland?
The main point of language is to be understood, but there are always those who would prefer to make language not a tool of communication, but rather of ideology. Radicals are eternally obsessed with the names of things, demanding that old conventions be thrown away and replaced with new, politically correct terms that serve the glorious cause of revolution, e.g., “birthing person,” “latinx” and so on. It is always and everywhere tiring and almost always a bust. It takes centuries of use to shape the way we understand words, so top-down dictums usually fail to achieve short-term changes. When the Soviet Union fell, Leningrad slipped right back to being St. Petersburg.
In the short term, though, the politics of naming have their effect. If someone uses or fails to use the required newspeak it marks them as either in or out of step with a movement. Which is what Trump is trying to do by mau-mauing The Associated Press and other media outlets to exclusively use “Gulf of America” in reference to that body of water.
Unless the AP calls it the Gulf of America on first reference, the administration will continue to bar the wire service from ordinary access that White House reporters get to cover the president as part of the rotating pool that shares coverage with the rest of the press corps.
The administration no doubt dislikes lots of what the AP reports, so this is double coupons for Team Trump. They get to pick a fight with a major outlet, limit its access, and tease out the culture war that Republicans have so robustly been winning since the 2024 election.
This isn’t censorship, since the AP is free to publish whatever it likes, but it sure is an attack on free speech. Limiting access to news organizations based on the words they choose gets right up to the First Amendment and gives it a poke in the eye. It also lays down a marker for other outlets that wish to ingratiate themselves to Trump, like Axios that trumpeted its enthusiastic compliance with the dictum.
For the rest of us, the work of being understood just gets a little bit more challenging. It’s very odd to say Gulf of America without context, so journalists have to use excess words to describe what until a month ago was a centuries-old convention of naming. Outlets can choose which term to use first, but until the new name sticks or dies of disuse like Carter’s “kilometers per hour” signs, both will be required. In the meantime, the speech police will be watching, checking everyone for signs of compliance or resistance.
One day, people may say “Did you know that the official name is actually the Gulf of America. They changed it in 2025 and never changed it back.” Or it may be said, “Until 2025, it was actually called the Gulf of Mexico.” But that sure won’t be settled any time soon.
