What’s in a rename?

As insane as some of Donald Trump’s policy proposals first appear, many acquire a certain logic on closer examination. Greenland, with only 56,000 people, has mineral wealth as essential to the weaponry of the twenty-first century as South Africa’s uranium was to that of the twentieth. The place really may require exceptional treatment, as Trump suggests.

Meanwhile, the US Agency for International Development actually did drift so far into propaganda and election interference that zeroing out its budget came to seem sensible.

But there are other policies on which the halo of idiocy still burns as bright as it did on the day the President first proposed them. Chief among these is the executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” It does the opposite of what Trump thinks it does. It is the act of a puny country, not a great one. Great empires look outward in all directions. This is our gulf that lies in the direction of Mexico, a mighty statesman would say. We have to call it that to distinguish it from the many other gulfs we possess. Naming everything after yourself is worthy of Enver Hoxha’s Albania or Idi Amin’s Uganda.

Worse, it kicks over the philosophical basis of Trumpism: fighting woke. Woke was a totalitarianism in embryo. Totalitarian because it put words in people’s mouths and thoughts in their heads. People resented being lectured on pronouns, even if they were too frightened to complain. Yet in February, the Associated Press was banned from White House press gatherings because it had been slow to adopt the propaganda term “Gulf of America.” Trump: the first president in history to punish a journalist for deadnaming.

Renaming can betoken extremism. Cambodia went through a few years as “Kampuchea.” Ditto Burma as “Myanmar.” It should have been a warning sign when, at the turn of the century, grand newspapers told us to use “Kyiv” instead of the familiar “Kiev.” Just what every language needs: more words where the pronunciation doesn’t match the spelling.

In his class on Ukrainian history, which was an internet sensation in 2022, Yale professor Timothy Snyder criticized the Russian academicians who traveled to Ukraine and Crimea under Catherine the Great to rename Turkic places and give Greek names to new towns (Kherson, Mariupol). The goal was to “obliviate” (good word!) the world that came before. But Snyder’s own university, as it happens, is the capital of contemporary academic obliviation. In 2016, Yale summoned a “Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming,” stacked it with race theorists and activist scolds, and set about rendering the campus unrecognizable to its alumni. Calhoun College — named for the nation-bestriding nineteenth-century senator and political theorist John C. Calhoun — became Hopper College, after a woman who had been a Navy mathematician. Calhoun had once called slavery “a positive good.”

Reputational downsizing was the rule. Robert E. Lee, the Southern general whom Dwight Eisenhower placed among the four greatest Americans who ever lived, did not share Calhoun’s opinions — but he has been deemed equally unworthy of honor. Many high schools and streets named for Lee now bear the name of the brave civil-rights marcher and mediocre Georgia congressman John Lewis, who, by an accident of timing, died in the summer of 2020, just as statues were being toppled and buildings rechristened.

We have been through such phases before. McCarthyism — though much less damaging to freedom of expression than the woke era — produced its share of dumb renamings. In 1953, the Cincinnati Reds, fearing the public would mistake their ballplayers for Communists, changed their name to the Red Legs. Fans were scornful, but the team was unembarrassed. It would not return the name “Reds” to the team’s uniforms until 1961. Today’s Cleveland “Guardians” should revert to their century-old pre-woke name: the Indians. The Washington “Commanders” ought to let go of the joke and become the Redskins again.

The Trump administration got off to a good start in returning to names Americans were comfortable with, restoring the name “Mount McKinley” to the peak Barack Obama insisted we call “Denali.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth lately announced that “Fort Liberty” had reverted to Fort Bragg. (Though in a roundabout way: it now honors not the Confederate general after whom it was originally named but another Bragg, a World War Two private.)

Defeating woke with principles turns out to be hard. Trump tried this approach in his first term. Now he is operating on a cruder basis: that of rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies. He has scored some successes. But he is in danger of forgetting who his friends are. The many voters who backed Trump because they actually do care about freedom of speech are unlikely to resign themselves to pretending the Gulf of Mexico is called something else.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.