President Donald Trump wants to leave his mark on maps. The real estate mogul-turned-president has long understood the symbolism in plastering his name on buildings, but now he is increasingly imposing America’s name on geographic entities. But symbolism matters less than substance, and the president’s energies would be more usefully employed in pursuit of the substance behind the slogan he made famous, “Make America Great Again.”

President Trump’s name-changing spree began immediately, if slowly. On his first day in office, he declared in an executive order “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness” that the “Gulf of Mexico” would henceforth be known as the “Gulf of America.”

More than a year and a half later, Trump made a parallel move on another body of water. On August 27, he ordered the Interior Secretary to rename “Lake Ontario” as “Lake America.”

Now, Trump appears eager to keep up the name-changing momentum. Over Labor Day weekend, he posted social media messages suggesting that “New Mexico” should be renamed “New America.”

The rationale for renaming these locations is not readily apparent. Nothing has fundamentally changed about the bodies of water (and state) in question. Many have noticed that President Trump’s renaming actions coincided with trade disputes with our neighbors to the north and south. But what leverage Trump hopes to gain from changing these names is one point the typically loquacious president has never divulged.

The rationale for name changes seems to invoke two opposite ideas at once. On the one hand, changing the longstanding name of a geographic entity without changing anything about it suggests that the name it holds is really no big deal, so it can be done with ease. On the other hand, the name changes are pointless unless they also carry great symbolic weight.

“What’s in a name?” asked Shakespeare’s Juliet. “That which we call a rose [b]y any other word would smell as sweet.” Exactly, says Trump, but calling it an “American” rose would make it all the sweeter.

This attitude leads only to confusion. Geographically speaking, America refers not to a single country but to an entire hemisphere. When all the countries in North America and South America get together, they do so in the Organization of American States (OAS). The Caribbean Sea could just as easily be called the “American Sea,” and the mountain range extending from Alaska to Chile (The Rockies and Andes) could be called the “American Mountains.” Naming everything “America” is simply not a useful way to distinguish one thing from another.

(On that note, the name “America” itself derives from the Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci. If we are to rename geographical entities, why name them after a European, rather than an American figure, like Washington, Lincoln, or any number of satisfactory candidates?)

This attitude also undermines longstanding naming conventions, by which geographical entities are named based on how they are used. The principle can be seen most clearly in the names of roads connecting small towns. From Seneca, S.C., the town in which this author was born, a driver could take Fairplay Road to Fairplay, Clemson Boulevard to Clemson, Pendleton Road to Pendleton, and Old Greenville Highway to Greenville (although a faster highway now bypasses this latter option — hence the “Old” in its name).

Naming every road “Seneca” would not tell travelers where they were going, but naming roads after their destination does. By the same principle, another road in Upstate South Carolina, between Walhalla and Pickens, is called Pickens Highway near Walhalla and Walhalla Highway near Pickens. By this principle, from America’s perspective, the Gulf of Mexico is the body of water one crosses to get to Mexico; renaming it the “Gulf of America” simply adopts Mexico’s perspective.

As for Ontario, it turns out that the lake’s name far predates the Canadian province. The word “Ontario” derives from an Iroquois word meaning “great lake” or “beautiful water,” and the lake was first called “Ontario” on maps in the 1650s. Trump’s intended slam of Canada actually reverses the order by giving the province a higher priority than the lake.

In any event, President Trump is attempting to change the longstanding names of geographic entities by executive fiat. This is, at the very least, a very un-conservative thing to do. Conservatism values and seeks to conserve the goodness that human societies organically create over time. It opposes the urges to centralization and top-down fiat authority that seek to refashion society according to some ideological schema. These urges come from the radicalism of the French Revolution and its communist heirs, not from the conservative tradition in which America has flourished.

In fairness to President Trump, his is not the first administration to implement an ideologically-driven renaming agenda. The Obama administration renamed Mount McKinley, the continent’s highest peak, as “Mount Denali,” respecting the native name. The Biden administration renamed 10 military bases named after Confederate commanders from the Civil War.

But President Trump should also recall how easy it is to reverse such a name change that lacks grassroots recognition. In the same executive order that named the Gulf of America, Trump also restored the name “Mount McKinley.” That same year (2025), his administration also restored the names of the 10 military bases whose names were changed by Biden (although they were renamed not after the Civil War commanders, but after other soldiers with the same surnames).

Geographical features are named and renamed all the time. But there is usually a catalyzing event or some organic reason for the name change. If a new city or national monument is established, then of course it needs a new name. If America went to war with Mexico, then changing the name of the Gulf might make more sense. But a name change must have public buy-in to last, and that usually requires some sort of reason.