One of the worst trends of 2025 started with “Gulf of America.” President Donald Trump, who spent much of the year renaming things, at times after himself, said in his Jan. 20 inaugural address that he’d be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico “a short time from now,” and hours later he signed an executive order to do just that. That executive order also changed the name of the highest peak in North America from Denali back to Mount McKinley, an unmistakable insult to the Alaska Natives who sought and received a restoration of the mountain’s ancient name under Barack Obama’s administration.
There was an instant leap from absurdity to authoritarianism when he barred Associated Press journalists from White House news conferences.
Trump was only beginning. While much of his renaming spree served his narcissistic tendencies and backward-looking views, some moves set the stage for more menacing and autocratic actions. For example, there was an instant leap from absurdity to authoritarianism when he barred Associated Press journalists from White House news conferences because the AP didn’t stop referring to the “Gulf of Mexico.” (MS NOW also doesn’t use “Gulf of America.”)
At the end of Trump’s first term, Congress stripped the names of Confederate traitors from U.S. military bases. Trump vetoed that bill, but Congress overrode the veto. Upon his return to the White House, the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth effectively pulled an end-around on Congress by cynically finding non-Confederates named Benning, Bragg, Ford, Hood, etc. to name the bases for. And he and Hegseth have embarked upon a $2 billion campaign to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War. No such name change has been approved by Congress. Trump also had the U.S. Institute of Peace renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.
The president, who regularly extols the virtues of what he calls “beautiful, clean coal” and believes windmills cause cancer, renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado to the National Lab of the Rockies.
And in yet more disregard for Indigenous sensibilities, Trump wrote on his social media platform in July that “The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should immediately change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team.” After claiming that there’s “a big clamoring for this,” he wrote, “I may put a restriction on them if they don’t change the name back… I won’t make a deal for them to build a stadium in Washington.”
In November, ESPN, citing multiple sources with knowledge of the situation, reported that Trump wants the new Washington stadium named for him. When Axios asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt for a response, all she’d say was a Trump stadium “would surely be a beautiful name.”
But among all of Trump’s name changes — done without consensus or even consultation — the one that followed him making himself the board chair of Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was the most distasteful. His hand-picked board last month voted to change the name of the esteemed arts institution to the clumsily worded “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” giving Trump top billing over the assassinated Kennedy.
Trump also had the U.S. Institute of Peace renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. “It is beyond comprehension,” veteran broadcast journalist Maria Shriver, a niece of JFK, wrote on social media, “that this sitting president has sought to rename this great memorial dedicated to President Kennedy. It is beyond wild that he would think adding his name in front of President Kennedy’s name is acceptable. It is not.” She’s right. It isn’t acceptable. For a president. But we shouldn’t be so sure that’s what Trump thinks he is. Just look at a March White House post on X, featuring the president wearing a crown and the words “LONG LIVE THE KING!” The largest and most organized protests against Trump in 2025 coalesced around the foundational and nonpartisan belief that Americans have “no kings.” They aptly captured the moment. Trump isn’t so much into governing as he is into decreeing. By changing the names of bodies of water and nonpolitical institutions — and even trying to force a football team to name things the way he’d like them labeled — his monarchical impulses show just why the chants of “No kings!” were so necessary.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. 
