Trump’s Renaming of the Gulf of Mexico and Its Implications

• President Donald Trump ordered the Gulf of Mexico to be renamed the Gulf of America.
• Google has agreed to honor the name change, while Mexico is pushing back.
• Experts say the name change reflects much deeper issues and could have larger implications.

President Donald Trump’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico is more than just geographical nitpicking — it’s a political move that shows how he wants to be perceived by the world, experts in international law and geography say.

The move could cause a headache for Google, which has since changed its map to go along with Trump’s renaming, and it has the potential to worsen US-Mexico relations, the experts said.

It also led to trouble for the Associated Press, which was barred from Trump’s executive order signing on Tuesday after it refused to use the new name.

As for whether Trump can unilaterally change the name of the body of water, the answer is yes — but only for the US.

Can the US rename a body of water?

In one sense, countries can call geographic features whatever they want within their own jurisdiction, said Ian Hurd, a political science professor at Northwestern University who researches international law.

“Countries name and rename features in their countries as they wish, and renaming is pretty common, especially when a new government wants to differentiate itself from past practices,” Hurd told Business Insider.

For example, he said, the Indian government has renamed many of the country’s cities to emphasize decolonization or Hindu nationalism, and many Russian place names changed throughout the 20th century.

And outside each country, “there is no formal body to decide on what things are called,” Hurd said.

There is a consultive body within the United Nations called the Group of Experts on Geographical Names that encourages international coordination and standardization of cartographic names. But countries do not have to follow its recommendations.

While individual states can make their own decisions about what to call a place, that doesn’t mean they have the authority to rename an international body of water, said Matthew Zierler, a political science professor at Michigan State University who studies foreign policy and international law.

“So renaming Denali to McKinley is within the United States’ purview, but the Gulf of Mexico is a different issue,” Zierler told BI. “Internationally, there have always been differences among countries about what to name specific bodies of water, islands, etc.”

“Names reflect culture, history, and identity, so the disagreements between countries on what to refer to a place are real,” but the core of the issue, he said, “is political rather than legal.”

What the name change means for Google

Following Trump’s executive order to rename the gulf, Google agreed to implement the change. In a post on X, Google said it would begin changing the name for US users of its maps once it had been officially entered into the US Geographic Names Information System, spurring Mexico’s president to push back in a letter to the company.

“We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources,” Google wrote in its X post.

The tech giant said in a follow-up comment that “when official names vary between countries, Maps users see their official local name” and the rest of the world sees both names.

On Monday, it officially updated Google Maps with the change.

While the name change was handed down by executive order from the president, Google has no legal requirement to adopt this naming convention, nor does any other private entity, Mark Lemley, a Stanford law professor, told BI.

“And indeed,” Lemley said, “if they were required to do so, they would be in a difficult position because other countries officially call it different things.”

Because Google is not required to follow Trump’s name-change order, its decision to do so anyway is, in essence, a political one, experts said.

“Google and other mapmakers are not focused on the law. They want to remain in business and will tend to follow the direction of the countries they are operating in,” Zierler said, adding that while this may be confusing to some, “I think it is quite clear to most that names are symbolic.”

Historically speaking, Google’s decision to abide by Trump’s name change is not unprecedented.

“Throughout history, cartographers have often served the interests of the powerful, so it is not surprising to see a company like Google follow suit with these name changes,” Reuben Rose-Redwood, a professor of geography and the director of the Critical Geographies Research Lab at the University of Victoria, told BI.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

Implications for the US and its relations with Mexico

Some legal experts said Trump’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico says a lot about how he wants himself, and the US, to be perceived by the world.

“Most name changes arise from culture-war politics,” Hurd told BI. “Nationalist governments often project an image of power by giving ideologically laden names to places. This appears to be the motivation in Trump’s claim to the ‘Gulf of America.'”

And that can send an unintended message to the world, Hurd added.

“Changing names is often a sign of weakness by a leader rather than strength,” Hurd said. “It reveals their insecurities about their place in the world.”

And Trump’s order does not reflect well on the state of US-Mexico relations, nor on the countries’ future rapport, Zierler said.

“The potential for this to be a major dispute between the US and Mexico is real,” Zierler told BI.

But the name change itself, he said, “is secondary to other issues the US president has with Mexico over immigration and trade.”

Mexico is concerned, as are other countries, about “United States unilateralism and being pushed around,” Zierler said, adding: “The naming dispute is emblematic of that.”

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum isn’t thrilled about Trump’s order to change the Gulf of Mexico’s name or Google’s decision to honor it.

In a letter to Google presented on Thursday, Sheinbaum urged Google to reconsider changing the 400-year-old name of the body of water on its maps, Reuters reported.

The name change “could only correspond to the 12 nautical miles away from the coastlines of the United States of America,” Sheinbaum said in Spanish as she read the letter in a morning press conference, according to Reuters.

Mexico says the US has no legal right to change the name of the body of water — which borders the US, Mexico, and Cuba — because the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea mandates that a country’s territory stretches only up to 12 nautical miles out from its coast, Reuters reported.

When Trump floated the name change before taking office last month, Sheinbaum responded by saying that parts of North America should be renamed Mexican America because a world map from 1607 named it as such.

“Why don’t we call it América Mexicana? That sounds nice, no?” she said at a press briefing at the time.

As for what Google’s top competitor will call the gulf, Apple has not indicated whether it will change the gulf’s name on its own maps. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.