Trump Suggests Renaming Pacific or Atlantic Ocean to Trump Ocean at Tennessee Rally

Trump floated the idea of renaming the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean during a rally in Clarksville, Tennessee on Saturday. He told the crowd that the country already has a gulf and a beautiful lake, so now it needs a river and an ocean.

“We’ve got the gulf. We’ve got a beautiful lake. Now, somebody said, you need a river,” he said. “We need a river. We need an ocean. We’ll call it ‘Trump Ocean’ or ‘Ocean of the Americas,’ something like that.” He added that before he leaves office, he thinks the country should have an ocean and a great river.

This fits a pattern from his second term. He previously renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and floated the idea of calling New Mexico “New America.” The state’s governor quickly dismissed that suggestion. In August, after trade talks with Canada broke down, he signed an order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Canada has no obligation to accept the new name, and Google and Apple maps only show “Lake America” to users in the United States.

Canada has been doing some renaming of its own. Ottawa City Council voted unanimously in August to take the first step toward renaming Trump Avenue, a residential street that has carried his name for about 25 years. “Taco Avenue,” a nod to the online acronym “Trump Always Chickens Out,” is among the suggestions and one of the front runners.

These changes do not come free. When the Congressional Budget Office looked at the Gulf of America, it estimated that updating federal documents and maps would cost less than $500,000 over five years. That figure only covers federal agencies. Democrat Val Hoyle pointed out that schools, libraries, and local governments would have to pay as well. “Who is going to pay for the maps, for the books, for the signs that municipalities, schools and libraries have to replace? We do as taxpayers,” she said. The mayor of Oswego, New York, has said updating signs and maps for Lake America would cost his city of 17,000 several thousand dollars.

New names do not always stick. In May, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s rebranding of the Kennedy Center as the “Trump Kennedy Center” was illegal. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” the judge wrote. Crews took Trump’s name off the building in June.

Online reactions to “Trump Ocean” have mostly treated the idea as temporary. One person wrote on X that the next president will reverse all these renamings. Another noted that the names only change for Americans while the rest of the world still uses the original ones. Others joked about it, asking about the newly renamed Planet Trump or suggesting a shift from “Pacific” to “Antagonistic.” One person even referenced the reflecting pool incident from this summer by writing that somebody should tell him you cannot repaint the ocean.