Trump can’t get the media to use ‘Gulf of America.’ Will ‘Lake America’ be any different?

He’s doing it again: Donald Trump has decided that Lake Ontario is actually Lake America. This follows his similar declaration last year that the Gulf of Mexico was actually the Gulf of America. (How long until we learn that the Rockies are actually the American Mountains?)

Trump’s power over what the federal government calls bodies of water seems near total. But he can’t control what the news media calls them. (Though he certainly tried with the Associated Press last time.)

Last October, I checked in to see how much success Trump had had getting “Gulf of America” into news copy. The answer: Not much, outside MAGA media.

And with his attention turning again to geography, I thought I’d check in to see if more outlets had been convinced. The answer: Nope. The opposite, in fact — “Gulf of Mexico” is increasing its lead.

I used Media Cloud to find all mentions of “Gulf of Mexico,” “Gulf of America,” or both in news stories between Feb. 1, 2025 and Aug. 26, 2026 — the day before “Lake America” was born. I looked at three different groups of news outlets, as defined by Media Cloud:

• 247 major national news outlets — think The New York Times, CBS News, the Chicago Tribune, TMZ, and Rolling Stone. (But this isn’t just the so-called “MSM” — a sprinkling of partisan sites like Breitbart and AlterNet also make the list.)
• 572 sites that Democrats tweet about more than average (and which thus likely have more Democratic readers) — a mix of explicitly liberal publications (The Nation, Mother Jones), mainstream outlets (The Boston Globe, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), and magazines and magazine-like sites (Vogue, Pitchfork).
• 406 sites that Republicans tweet about more than average (and which thus likely have more Republican readers) — a list that includes Fox News, The Gateway Pundit, and The Federalist, but also less partisan outlets like the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Orange County Register, and a ton of local TV stations.

For each group, I added up how many times each category of outlet used only “Gulf of Mexico” and only “Gulf of America” in a story over each rolling 28-day period. (I’m not counting stories that use both, which are mostly stories about the renaming controversy.) Then I calculated the ratio of “Mexico” to “America” for each period and charted them below. (Note that the Y-axis is logarithmic. I tried using a linear scale, but it would have made the chart very, very tall.)

Three things stand out. First, “Gulf of Mexico” is overwhelmingly the more popular term, across all three of the groups.

Second, “Gulf of Mexico” is getting more popular over time, not less. When I last wrote in October, national outlets were producing roughly 3.75× as many GoM-only stories as GoA-only ones. By August 26, the day before “Lake America,” that ratio was about 7.2×. And the outlets that Democrats disproportionately favor have basically eliminated “Gulf of America” entirely — reaching a ratio of 69 “Mexicos” for every 1 “America” at its peak in late July.

If you run LOESS regressions on each group to determine the smoothed trend line across the entire timespan, you get this:

• National outlets go from using “Mexico” 1.24× as much as “America” to using it 7.23×.
• Democrat-favored outlets go from 2.51× to 26.89×.
• Republican-favored outlets go from 0.58× — that is, using GoA 72% more than GoM — to using GoM 3.13× as much as GoA.

Third, even the news sites that Republicans favor couldn’t quite accept “Gulf of America.” They could only stick with favoring GoA over GoM until around April 15 of last year — less than three months after Trump’s executive order. They’ve been on Team Mexico ever since, other than handful of days sprinkled in May and September 2025.

But categories are one thing — how about individual news sites? Here’s a (sortable) chart answering that question for the 292 sites that used either “Gulf of Mexico” or “Gulf of America” at least 10 times in this period. Click the filters to look at only Dem-favored, only GOP-favored, or all outlets, and sort the table by either GoA share or GoM share.

Of the 123 Republican-favored sites in this list, only 15 used “Gulf of America” solo in more than 50% of stories. (Fox Business, with 83% GoA, is the most loyal.)

In contrast, of the 117 Democrat-favored sites that published at least 10 stories mentioning the Gulf, 30 have never mentioned “Gulf of America,” even once. And among all 292 outlets, of all stripes, 157 used “Gulf of America” solo in less than 10% of stories.

All of which suggests that, while Donald Trump can get Google and Apple to follow orders, getting any media uptake of “Lake America” outside MAGA outlets will be a struggle.