“For us, it is still the Gulf of Mexico, and for the entire world it is still the Gulf of Mexico," she said shortly after Trump signed the executive order.
Before his Jan. 20 inauguration, Trump announced plans to change the Gulf of Mexico’s name to the “Gulf of America” — and signed an executive order to do so as soon as he was in office.
In 2012, a member of the Mississippi Legislature proposed a bill to rename portions of the gulf that touch that state's beaches “Gulf of America,” a move the bill author later referred to as a “joke.” That bill, which was referred to a committee, did not pass.
Two years earlier, comedian Stephen Colbert had joked on his show that, following the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it should be renamed “Gulf of America” because "we broke it, we bought it.
For more than four centuries, the body of water stretching from Florida through Texas and into Mexico has been known as the Gulf of Mexico.
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