President Donald Trump told a rally crowd in South Carolina that he personally called Google CEO Sundar Pichai to talk about renaming the Atlantic Ocean, then announced he would probably drop the idea after Pichai pushed back. The remarks came Wednesday evening at a rally for U.S. Sen. Darline Graham, where Trump has previously floated renaming American bodies of water.
According to The Washington Post, Trump said he would “probably pass” on the renaming push after Pichai told him, “Please don't ask us to do that.” Trump recounted asking Google to make the change because the company had been “really great with the lake,” an apparent reference to Google Maps’ relabeling of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, as noted by CNN.
Per the seed report from Arizona's Family, Trump also said Pichai explained that oceans cover a lot of countries, an account Trump attributed directly to the Google chief executive during the call. Trump told the crowd he still likes both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans as names, even as he keeps raising the idea of swapping one out.
A Pattern That Started With a Lake and a Gulf
Trump framed the ocean idea as the next step after two earlier changes. “We have a lake and we have a gulf, now we need a river and we need an ocean,” he said, according to the Post. He has signed executive orders renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and Lake Ontario as Lake America, and has said he has been looking for a river to rename, with the Hudson River and the Mississippi River among the ones he has considered.
Time magazine notes that Trump floated renaming the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean as “Trump Ocean” or the “Ocean of the Americas” at a separate rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, earlier this month, before raising the Atlantic idea again at the South Carolina event. The outlet also reports that Trump has focused much of his renaming push on places including Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico, as detailed by Time. Google had not issued a formal statement on the reported Atlantic request as of that report.
How the Earlier Name Changes Actually Played Out Online
The Gulf of Mexico change shows how a presidential order translates, or doesn't, onto the map people actually see. Google's own blog explains that users in the United States see “Gulf of America,” users in Mexico see “Gulf of Mexico,” and everyone else sees both names, with the display determined by a user's country location. The company's blog also confirms that the federal Geographic Names Information System officially updated the body of water's name in its records, per Google.
The U.S. Geological Survey has said the U.S. Board on Geographic Names played a role in enacting that order and entering the new name into the federal place-names database, according to the agency. The Lake Ontario change followed a similar federal path: the White House directed in a presidential action that the lake be renamed Lake America, and the resulting executive order required the federal naming system to add that name and drop the old one.
Not Every Map Followed Along
Even with the federal change in place, the Lake Ontario rename didn't universally take hold. The BBC reports that U.S. viewers of Google Maps now see “Lake America” while Canadian viewers still see “Lake Ontario,” and that MapQuest refused to adopt the new name at all, instead recording more than 1.5 million installs across the U.S. and Canada since the order was issued, according to the BBC. The same pattern held for the Gulf of Mexico change, which was adopted on U.S. federal maps and by some digital mapping services while Mexico and international users kept seeing either the old name or both.
That history helps explain why Trump's account of his call with Pichai landed the way it did. For now, Trump has said he would probably let the Atlantic Ocean idea go, while continuing to look for a river to add to the list.
