The president plans to highlight his proposed name change mid-route on Air Force One.
President Donald Trump’s promise—and subsequent executive order—to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America displayed a showman’s flair for branding.
Today Trump could take that showmanship a step further when Air Force One flies him across the Gulf of Mexico from his private Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Florida, to New Orleans for the Super Bowl. Trump is considering a plan in which, as the plane crosses the gulf, he will bring the group of reporters traveling with him—known as the “pool”—up to a different cabin, where he plans to highlight his proposed name change, according to two people familiar with the discussions who requested anonymity to discuss closely held details.
No matter that Trump has already floated “Gulf of America” during the election, mentioned it during his inaugural address—“a short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,” he said to applause—and signed an executive order doing as much in his Day One batch of directives. He and his team are still discussing this as a Super Bowl Sunday stunt, like the producers of Rocky trying to squeeze one last sequel out of an aging franchise. (The White House did not respond to requests for comment.)
During his first term, Trump regularly visited the press cabin of Air Force One, and occasionally brought the pool up to his personal cabin to chat, playing the role of consummate host. Once, he invited reporters to join him in watching a recording of a Democratic presidential primary debate, offering color commentary throughout.
And as Trump likely understands, the only way to compete with the Super Bowl and its color commentary this evening is to offer a little bit of a pre-game show himself.
Trump has generally offered an isolationist—“America First”—worldview. But since his return to the White House, the president has nodded to the idea of expansionism as well. In addition to promising to take back the Panama Canal, Trump has also talked about acquiring Greenland and teased about making Canada the 51st state. When pressed by reporters, he has refused to rule out the use of military or economic force in his efforts to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal.
But so far, at least, his decrees to rename the Gulf of Mexico have prompted as much mockery as they have intimidation. Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a Democrat, yesterday posted on social media that while Trump “is busy unilaterally renaming bodies of water down south, thought we’d get started up in New England”—alongside a map of the eastern seaboard, with “Gulf of Rhode Island” crudely written across the Atlantic Ocean in black marker. And on Friday, Democrat JB Pritzker posted a faux-serious “important announcement from the Governor of Illinois,” in which he deadpanned that, after much study, the world’s finest geographers believe that a Great Lake needs to be named after a great state, which is why “hereinafter, Lake Michigan shall be known as Lake Illinois.”
With Trump, the line between jokes and true policy can be difficult to discern. But today, at least—and fittingly for Super Bowl Sunday—spectacle seems to be the point.
