Google Maps to roll out Trump-approved Denali and Gulf of Mexico rebrands

Among the flurry of executive orders expelled from Donald J Trump following his inauguration as US President last week, one of the more impotent was “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.”

The thrust was that Mount Denali, the highest peak in North America, would revert to Mount McKinley, named after 25th President William McKinley, as it had officially been known from 1917 until 2015, when President Obama legitimized its Native Alaskan name.

Some 4,500 miles (7,200 km) to the southeast, the order also targets the Gulf of Mexico to rebrand as the Gulf of America because it has “been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America,” so on, so forth.

The order is stuffed to the gills with Trump’s usual jingoistic bombast. For example, “President McKinley championed tariffs to protect US manufacturing, boost domestic production, and drive US industrialization and global reach to new heights. He was tragically assassinated in an attack on our Nation’s values and our success.” Therefore, terrific guy. He probably understood how tariffs work.

Anyway, the world has been waiting with bated breath to see how cartographers would respond to such edicts. After all, it’s not every day that a head of state arbitrarily renames a landmark or 600,000 sq mi (1.55 million sq km) of ocean that also shares 2,000 miles of its 3,700-mile coastline with Mexico and Cuba.

Google of Google Maps fame has been one of the first to announce its intention to toe the line. Writing on social media, it said: “We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps. We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”

This means that Google defers to the Geographic Names Information System, the official repository of geographic names for all places (natural and human-made) in the United States, maintained by the US Geological Survey.

While both mountain and gulf still bear their former names in Google Maps, the order gives the Secretary of the Interior 30 days to “update the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) to reflect the renaming” of both locations. Once that has been completed, Google Maps should show the same.

Shakespeare’s Juliet famously said: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” meaning that names are just labels that don’t affect the underlying nature of a thing.

Peter Bellerby of London company Bellerby & Co. Globemakers said of the Gulf of America: “It is, I suppose, an internationally recognized sea, but (to be honest), a situation like this has never come up before so I need to confirm the appropriate convention.

“If, for instance, [Trump] wanted to change the Atlantic Ocean to the American Ocean, we would probably just ignore it.”

Likewise, Alaska Natives will continue to refer to Mount McKinley as Denali, as they have for centuries, and Mexico at the very least will stick with the established nomenclature for the body of water.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said the day after Trump’s executive order was issued: “For us and for the entire world it will continue to be called the Gulf of Mexico.” ®