Donald Trump is eyeing up new names for more bodies of water, despite pushback from Google’s CEO.
“We have a lake, and we have a gulf. Now we need a river and an ocean,” he said at a rally in Mississippi on Monday.
The president spoke about renaming the Atlantic Ocean to the “American Ocean” and quipped: “I think Europe will be thrilled.”
Trump previously raised the idea last Wednesday at a rally in South Carolina, where he said that Google CEO Sundar Pichai had tried to change his mind.
Trump said that he called Pichai, joking that Google was “still rattled” from his renaming of the Gulf.
Google Maps previously changed its labels for the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario to the Gulf of America and Lake America following Trump’s executive orders. The tech giant said the decision aligns with its policy to draw on official government databases. Users outside the US still see the original names followed by Trump’s names in brackets.
However, Trump said that when he pitched the idea of renaming the Atlantic, Pichai replied, “This time I’m not doing it.”
“Oceans are different, sir. They cover really a lot of countries. Please don’t ask us to do that.”
“So I’ll probably pass,” Trump told the crowd last week. “I think let’s keep it the Atlantic Ocean.”
The president first brought up the idea at a Tennessee rally earlier this month, where he floated renaming either the Atlantic or the Pacific as “Trump Ocean” or “Ocean of the Americas.”
While he also spoke on Monday about renaming a river, he told the Mississippi crowd that the state’s namesake river won’t be relabeled.
“The Mississippi River, I’m not changing the name of the Mississippi,” Trump said. “I promise.”
