President Trump has claimed that the CEO of Google talked him out of renaming the Atlantic Ocean.
Trump, who in his second term has shown a penchant for renaming large bodies of water, made the claim at a rally in South Carolina as he tried to drum up support for Senator Darline Graham ahead of the midterm elections.
“We have a lake, we have a gulf. Now we need a river, and we need an ocean,” he said, eferring to executive orders to rename Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico to Lake America and the Gulf of America, respectively.
Trump went on to say that he would consider only two oceans for bearing either his name or America’s.
“I only like two oceans: the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean,” he explained. “I’m not gonna put either ‘Trump’ or ‘America’ on any other ocean but these two.”
“We seriously looked at the Atlantic Ocean,” Trump continued, noting that he decided to speak directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
However, the tech executive was reluctant to change the ocean’s name despite Google amending the gulf’s name on its map service in some countries.
“‘No, no, no, this time I’m not doing it,’” Trump said, supposedly quoting Pichai. “He said, ‘Oceans are different, sir. They cover really a lot of countries. Please don’t ask us to do that.’ So I’ll probably pass.”
Instead, Trump suggested to the crowd at Clemson University that he could rename a different ocean.
“Pacific Ocean, we're gonna call it the American Ocean. How do you think Europe would feel?” he asked. “Do you think they’d like that?”
The European continent does not border the Pacific Ocean, instead bordering the Atlantic Ocean.
Trump’s efforts to rename both Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico have been widely criticized, with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stating that his country will continue to refer to the former by its original name.
“We know that the United States is changing. Their trade relations, their foreign policy, their national monuments, their hydronyms,” he said. “Canadian women and men also know that things must be called by their name, and this lake is called Lake Ontario — today and forever.”
The renaming of the Gulf of Mexico has led to The Associated Press filing a lawsuit against Trump administration officials after the publication was banned from certain press events due to its decision not to use the Gulf of America name.
Despite the backlash to renaming bodies of water, Trump has also floated renaming the Strait of Hormuz - a vital oil and liquefied natural gas trade route at the center of the U.S’s war with Iran - to the “Trump Strait.”
During a rally earlier in October, he said that he would not rename New York’s Hudson River, which is named after explorer Henry Hudson.
“He did a good job of setting up that sucker a long time ago,” Trump said.
The Independent has contacted Google for comment.
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