Busy times for crayon-wielding US president Donald Trump, Earth’s most tireless freelance cartographer, who at the weekend celebrated the US labouring under the highest diesel prices in its history while his “two-week” Iran war edges into its seventh month with a social media spree in which he pushed renaming New Mexico as New America.
In some ways, it was a surprise to see Trump go for merely rebranding a state at this point, given that it was only so recently that he declared: “If you think about it, we have a gulf, and we have a lake. Now all we need is an ocean.” This is believed to be a reference to the Gulf of America, formerly – and indeed currently, in every meaningful sense – the Gulf of Mexico. It was also a nod to Lake America, as precisely no one calls Lake Ontario despite Trump supposedly retitling it by executive order last month, in another fit of pique over his trade war with Canada. Candidates for this heavily trailed American Ocean clearly include the Pacific and the Atlantic – though why the other oceans should be locationally ineligible increasingly feels unclear. At this rate, geography exams in the US are also about to get a whole lot easier.
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In the end, you sense, most of the places in the US will go to the chop shop, and either have “America” bolted on the back, or have the Trump name fused on to them as a prefix. See the Donald J Trump and John F Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, or the Donald J Trump Institute of Peace in Washington DC. Or, indeed, the President Donald J Trump International Airport in Palm Beach, Florida. A new class of warship may also be procured for naming privileges.
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As for potential rebrand candidates/victims, how your area votes clearly affects the order in which its landmarks – or itself in its entirety – will be slapped with a fun new identity. When proposing the New Mexico renaming, Trump casually noted that it was “one of the great vote-cheating states of all time”. I wouldn’t be feeling all that confident if I were the Georgia state capitol, or the Trump America capitol as it may imminently be known.
Meanwhile, it must be said that all this frenetic activity does feel born of Trump’s conviction that it should surely be possible to shitpost his way out of anything, even a war. After all, the Iran war, which I seem to remember was won on day one, has now been going on for more than six months. This feels confusing. First it was going to be two weeks, then four to five weeks. Four days into Operation Epic Fury, Trump explained that the US was “already substantially ahead of our time projections”, while the secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, added: “It could move up, it could move back.” Having said that, evidence suggests it could only move up, although Trump wrapped up his first week of the conflict back in March by assuring the American people that his campaign continued “to totally demolish the enemy far ahead of schedule and at levels that people have never seen before”. Two days after that, the conflict was downgraded to “a short excursion”, with non-committal historical allies dismissed with a triumphant: “We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!” The war was “complete, pretty much”, he said two days later.
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And yet, was it? A couple of weeks in, Trump was explaining he’d know when the war should be over because he’d “feel it in my bones”. Alas, he seems to have failed to get the arthritic signal to pull out as late as three weeks in, despite assuring everyone that – contrary to appearances such as still bombing the shit out of things – the war had in fact been over “in two or three days”. Flash forward to a month in, and they were still “way ahead of schedule”, although once the five-week mark was hit Trump was dropping casual asides like “a whole civilization will die tonight”. Six weeks in, things were going “swimmingly”. Although, not to nitpick, but were they?
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That was April. In May, a deal with the Iranians could apparently “happen any day”. By the end of the month, it could have potentially happened “over the weekend”. Same thing a weekend later. A whole two months after that, unfortunately, Trump shifted from the war being over to declaring that his notional/imaginary agreements to end the war were in fact the thing that was “over”. He no longer wished to negotiate with Tehran. Jump ahead to the present day, in fact, and he has spent quite a lot of the past week bombing the shit out of things again. Which is very much the behaviour of any state that won a war back in the first days of March. Unhelpfully, the former US defence secretary Leon Panetta estimated at the weekend that the war would drag on for another six months.
All of which suggests there has really never been a better time to rename New Mexico. Those eternal searchers for a so-called Trump doctrine are surely beginning to see that it essentially boils down to wimping out of the big, painful calls that could literally move the dial – for example, boots on the ground – and existing in an eternally figurative zone where you can simply post the problem away. Here, there is no better way to signal that the war is over than to unilaterally rename the strait of Hormuz either the strait of Trump, or the strait of America. As some psychologists like to say: you have to name it to tame it.
