What’s in a name? Evidently, quite a lot.

As he flew over it on Feb. 9, President Donald Trump, by executive order, renamed the Gulf formerly known as Mexico as the Gulf of America. This, he said, is “even bigger than the Super Bowl,” which happened to be his destination at the time. (We’ll get back to the Gulf shortly.)

Trump has a penchant for naming and renaming. His towers, his businesses, his vodka, his shuttle, his university, his steaks, his sneakers and his memecoin are all named Trump.

Trump likes renaming, as well. When he ran for the presidency the second time, he promised to reverse the woke foolishness of the Biden administration by renaming Fort Liberty, in North Carolina, as Fort Bragg, the name it bore from 1918 to 2023.

Thus, for more than a century, Black Americans served at an Army base named in honor of Braxton Bragg, a slaveholder and second-rate Confederate general who fought to destroy the Union and keep Black soldiers’ ancestors enslaved.

Under Trump’s direction, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Feb. 10 renamed Fort Liberty, but, in a coy sleight-of-hand, he claimed to name it after Private First Class Roland L. Bragg, a paratrooper who served with distinction during World War II.

No one is fooled. Look for the reappearance for Fort Lee, Fort Polk, Fort Hood and so on. The spirit of the Old South still smolders just beneath our cultural surface, always ready to reignite.

Trump can’t move mountains, but he can rename them. On his first day in office Trump signed an executive order renaming Alaska’s Denali as Mount McKinley, after our 25th president, William McKinley, whom, on lists of best to worst presidents, historians generally rank somewhere near the middle.

But Trump likes McKinley because McKinley liked tariffs, and it doesn’t hurt that McKinley’s administration presided over a period of dubious American expansionism. So now, suddenly, Denali is Mount McKinley again.

What’s going on here? Why is Trump so interested in renaming? And is this particular disruption merely trivial compared to so many others during his first month in office?

Back to the Gulf of Mexico…er, I mean the Gulf of America. I’ve lived within 40 miles of that vast body of water for most of my life, and old habits die hard.

But there are several things wrong with renaming the Gulf formerly known as Mexico. Here are two of them:

First: Trump is famous for being a good dealmaker, but renaming the gulf is a unilateral deal that expends considerable political capital with little ROI—return on investment.

What does it cost us to rename the gulf?

We offend Mexico, a worthy nation on our southern border that should be one of our closest allies and trading partners. In Central and South America we reinforce long-simmering suspicions about our imperialistic intentions. Panama, your fears are justified.

And to the rest of the world, we appear to be petty and childish by claiming that something that doesn’t belong to us is “Mine!”

And what do we get in return for calling it the Gulf of America? Well, nothing, really.

Second: Renaming the gulf provides Trump with another handy cudgel to wave, particularly over the press, which is what Trump did last week when he barred the Associated Press from access to the Oval Office and Air Force One because it declined to adopt the Gulf of America into its editorial guidelines.

The AP isn’t being petulantly defiant. It accepts the renaming of Mount McKinley. But it notes that international geographical features often go by more than one name—the Gulf of California and the Sea of Cortez, for example—and their editorial policy is intended to reflect that reality. That didn’t satisfy Trump.

Naming and renaming aren’t just about ownership and pride. They nearly always reflect motivations that imply power and control. In this case, Trump is using renaming to intimidate and to extort fealty and submission from the press.

Which is always among the first things that would-be authoritarians try to do.

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