Summary
Google Maps will rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” for U.S. users following a U.S. government decision.
The U.S. Department of Interior recently announced the official name change, implemented by the Board on Geographic Names.
Google stated it updates names based on official government sources.
The name will remain “Gulf of Mexico” in Mexico and display both names elsewhere globally.
This change stems from an executive order by Trump, who also reversed the 2015 renaming of Alaska’s Denali to Mount McKinley.
I kind of get the whole 'Gulf of America’s, at least conceptionally, America is the continent yada yada yada, it’s fine, it’s silly but fine.
But the Mount McKinley stuff is really baffling to me. Afaik McKinley never even visited Alaska during his presidency, alaskans themselves tried to change the name since at least the 1980s and the only thing that stood in the way was Ohio, as McKinleys home state, blocking the name change, until in 2015 they eventually relented and the name was changed back to its original indigenous name.
Why would they change it arbitrarily again? I don’t understand? Is it just racism and it by chance happened during Obama’s presidency?
If you consider the most petty possible explanation for any of these “actions,” you’ll always be at least partially, if not entirely, correct.
I firmly believe that Trump and friends are having a grand time trolling the world as petty revenge for losing 2020.
In other words, there is no reason other than they can do it and we can do nothing about it.
Honestly, it’s the other way around for me. To be clear, Denali is a much better name than Mount McKinley for multiple reasons, but at least it’s our mountain and it was named Mount McKinley at one time.
Gulf of America is just a dumb power move that came out of nowhere, and it’s a body of water shared by multiple countries. It’s not like this is the only gulf named after only one country it touches out of a few - see also the Gulf of Oman and Gulf of Thailand, for example
Y’all know that’s not the argument :-)