Executive Order: “Restoring Names That Honour American Greatness”

This executive order isn’t about honouring greatness. It’s about rewriting geography to fit a political mythology — a hollow exercise in nationalist branding that steamrolls history, silences Indigenous voices, and weaponizes nostalgia in service of ego.

Let’s be clear: no mountain or body of water has cried out for renaming. No American economy has faltered because a peak in Alaska is called Denali — a name older than any president, rooted in the culture of the Koyukon Athabaskans, who’ve lived there for thousands of years. Restoring the name “Mount McKinley” isn’t about legacy; it’s about erasure. It’s a symbolic colonization masquerading as patriotism.

And now, rebranding the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America? That isn’t pride — it’s petty. It’s a bureaucratic tantrum against global reality. Mexico is not a concept to be erased with a red pen; it’s a sovereign neighbour, an essential trading partner, and a co-steward of the very waters this order tries to rename as if renaming changes ownership or history. The Gulf of Mexico has existed longer than the United States. You don’t rename history like it’s a failed casino.

What this order truly honours is arrogance — the kind that thinks American greatness must be constantly shouted, not quietly lived. It’s the nationalism of the insecure, where strength is measured in signage, not substance. This isn’t preserving heritage. It’s a branding stunt — cheap, performative, and culturally tone-deaf — engineered to inflame, divide, and distract from the real issues facing our nation.

American greatness doesn’t need monuments built on historical amnesia. It needs truth, humility, and respect — for the land, for its original names, and for all the people who live upon it. This order delivers none of that. It’s not patriotism. It’s performative cartography. And history will see it for what it is: a desperate attempt to trademark the landscape while ignoring the legacy it already bears.

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