US Coast Guard starts using 'Gulf of America'

The U.S. Coast Guard started using the term “Gulf of America” to refer to the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday, one day after President Trump signed an executive order setting in motion the process to change its U.S. official name.

The Coast Guard announced Tuesday it would deploy additional assets to several locations, including to “the maritime border between Texas and Mexico in the Gulf of America.”

The statement marked one of the first official uses of the term Gulf of America by the U.S. government.

It follows Trump’s executive order Monday giving the Department of the Interior 30 days to take “all appropriate action” needed to facilitate the name change.

Trump pledged to rename the Gulf of Mexico during his inaugural address, resurfacing a proposal he floated during a wide-ranging press conference earlier this month at his Palm Beach, Fla., resort.

“A short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the ‘Gulf of America,’ and we will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to ‘Mount McKinley,’ where it should be and where it belongs,” Trump said shortly after he was sworn in, referring to the Alaska mountain now known as Denali.

The renaming announcement, which prompted criticism, was immediately embraced by some of Trump’s supporters.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), Trump’s former 2024 primary rival, became one of the first public officials to use the term “Gulf of America,” when he issued an executive order Monday addressing a winter weather system hitting his state this week.

“WHEREAS, an area of low pressure moving across the Gulf of America, interacting with Arctic air, will bring widespread impactful winter weather to North Florida beginning Tuesday, January 21, 2025,” DeSantis's order read.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) also embraced the change and publicly urged Apple to change the official name on its mapping platform.

“Hey @tim_cook, just noticed Apple Maps still calls it the Gulf of Mexico. Sent a report through the app, but thought you’d want to know,” Crenshaw wrote in a Tuesday post on social platform X, tagging the company’s CEO Tim Cook.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) introduced a bill earlier this month to rename the Gulf of Mexico shortly after Trump announced his intention of doing the same.

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