Every American president is tasked with overseeing a global empire and goes about preserving it or expanding it in different ways. As President-elect Donald Trump prepares for his second term, he’s bringing his signature scammy touch to the enterprise. Speaking to reporters at a news conference Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, Trump, apropos of nothing, said, “We’ll be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring.” He added: “That covers a lot of territory. The Gulf of America: What a beautiful name. And it’s appropriate.”
Can the United States rename the Gulf of Mexico? It seems like he could, considering U.S. presidents can change the names of landmarks. That doesn’t mean other countries will go along with changing the name of a massive body of water whose name dates back more than four centuries.
“The Gulf of America” is a tacky nationalist marketing gimmick.
The bigger question isn’t can Trump do that but why he wants to. The answer is that Trump is a pure showman. Claiming he wants to rename the gulf as he threatens Mexico with tariffs is culture war bait that changes nothing — but it gives Trump an easy way to beat his chest and scratch the itch of the chauvinist without actually doing anything meaningful. “The Gulf of America” is a tacky nationalist marketing gimmick, not a policy solution to any problem the United States has.
Trump has recently floated far-fetched proposals to buy Greenland and wrest back control of the Panama Canal. In response to a question from a reporter at the news conference about what he’d be willing to do to secure them, Trump said something that sounded more dire. He refused to rule out military or economic coercion to obtain Greenland or the Panama Canal and said, “We need them for economic security.”
The United States is the richest and the most powerful country in the world, dominating trade routes, institutions and agreements around the globe. The idea that it needs ownership of the mostly frozen island of Greenland for economic security is ludicrous. Greenland is owned by Denmark, a U.S. NATO ally that shares geopolitical interests with the United States and has repeatedly told Trump that Greenland isn’t for sale.
Trump repeated the falsehood Tuesday that the Panama Canal is being “operated by China,” which he claims necessitates a U.S. intervention. Panama has been administering the canal for about 25 years, after the United States controlled it for about a century. As Harvard University lecturer Dennis Hogan recently wrote in The New York Times, “In Mr. Trump’s view of international competition, it seems sea routes are to be seized, controlled and monopolized, not shared among nations with equal access to all, as the Panama Canal is.” One can only conclude that, by floating the idea of possible wars, Trump is in some sense defrauding the public. If he’s not being serious about being willing to take military action, then his language is the kind of false bravado that depletes the United States’ credibility and makes him look like a witless cowboy. And if Trump is serious — which I believe is unlikely — then he’s undermining all his talk about how America First means opposing endless war. Trump has no mandate for arbitrarily returning the United States to a new era of old-school colonialism and annexation. Nobody asked for the United States to go to war with a NATO ally, a friend of the U.S. in Central America, or the world’s only other superpower to enhance U.S. supremacy over global waterways. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to turn inward and wind down U.S. involvement in at least some overseas conflicts. Now, as he toys with the idea of using force to claim more land for the United States, he’s revealing he was either lying on the campaign trail or he’s lying now.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
