Summary
Rep. Dan Crenshaw criticized Apple Maps for not renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, as mandated by Trump’s recent executive order titled “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness.”
Crenshaw’s complaint reflects broader conservative frustration, as tech platforms and the global community continue to use the original name.
Critics compare the move to past nationalist gestures like renaming french fries “freedom fries,” accusing conservatives of embracing identity politics and culture wars despite their political dominance.
The name change is unlikely to gain international traction.
Sorry if this has been asked elsewhere, but who even has the legal right to rename the gulf? It doesn’t belong to USA, right? So we can’t just rename it, right? If we did, everybody else in the world would keep calling it The Gulf of Mexico, right?
In the US, it’s the Board on Geographic Names.
Most countries don’t call it “The Gulf of Mexico”. For example in my country it’s “Mexický záliv”.
Did you know that Confucius was one of the rudest people to ever live? He never said “thank you” or “please” in his entire life.
Point is this is just Golf of Mexico in another language. Maybe not 100% literal, but it associates the site with the country Mexico, not America (which Mexico is a part of, but I’m not sure MAGAts understand or want to understand the nuance).
Mexico is a part of the continent of America. Not the country. Devil’s in the details and all.
I never claimed otherwise 😉 a country named “America” doesn’t exist to my knowledge.
The point is that the Czech name for the gulf has nothing to do with how Americans are calling it, it’s not even the same language. Why should be care Trump calls it different? He’s not our president, you know.
Yeah, it’s not like we English speakers call Germany Deutschland. And it’s not like we call the Persian Gulf the Iranian gulf after Iran changed it’s name.
To a certain degree countries respect other countries’ rights to nominative self determination. It’s actually pretty similar to how we respect people’s nominative self determination. When a country we interact with regularly significantly changes their name we generally adapt, but we typically do so in our own language, and we often don’t bother if they don’t mind the nickname we use.
Geographic features on the other hand, we usually need a good reason. There’s a reason they’re typically officially called whatever they’re actually called. The back and forth over the naming of Denali is weird in part because most Americans barely remembered it’s existence between name changes.
Every sovereign state can publish maps require everyone to use it as reference for further publication in its own territory. Hence you’ll see different maps on Google for different regions. There’s a UN committee to coordinate these and also to publish international water area names.