the edit, vol. 48
the cartography of the self
The Gulf of Mexico has been called that since 1607 — for 419 years, across Spanish colonial rule, Mexican independence, the Louisiana Purchase, two world wars, the Cold War, and eleven American administrations. The name encoded something real: the geography of a shared body of water touching three nations, carrying the memory of the civilization that named it and the centuries of trade, migration, and conflict that crossed it.
On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to call it the Gulf of America. Last week, he mused aloud about renaming Lake Ontario "Lake America" as part of negotiations with Canada. The Strait of Hormuz, he suggested, might become the "Gulf of Trump."
The Kennedy Center's board voted on August 13 to inscribe the words "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump" below the building's name — two months after a federal judge ruled that only Congress could change the name of a national memorial established to honor John F. Kennedy. The tarps from the previous renaming attempt are still draped over the building's signage. The administration has appealed the ruling. The scaffolding remains.
Mount Denali — which the Koyukon Athabascan people, who have lived near it for thousands of years, call "the high one" — is now Mount McKinley again. The Institute of Peace bears Trump's name. Military installations across the South that had recently been renamed away from Confederate generals have been renamed again, this time after Trump himself.
This is not a story about vanity, though vanity is part of it. It is a story about what names are, what they carry, and what the replacement of them reveals about the relationship between power and memory.
What Names Actually Are
A place-name is not decoration. It is a form of collective memory — a compressed record of who was there, what happened, what a community decided to remember and to transmit. The word Mississippi comes from the Ojibwe misi-ziibi, meaning "great river." Manhattan comes from the Lenape Mannahatta, meaning "island of many hills." The Appalachian Mountains are named for the Apalachee people. The Rio Grande is named in Spanish for the obvious reason. These names carry, in their syllables, the presence of the people who were there before the people who are here now, and the layers of encounter, displacement, and memory that produced the landscape Americans inhabit.
The Gulf of Mexico was named by Spanish colonizers in the 16th century for the empire whose territory surrounded it. The name carries that history — the Aztec civilization that Spain encountered and destroyed, the three centuries of colonial rule, the eventual emergence of the Mexican nation that gave the name its modern meaning. It is shared with Mexico and Cuba, who were not consulted about its reassignment. It appears in international maritime law, shipping contracts, insurance documents, and the navigational charts of every navy in the world. It is the name by which the body of water is known to the people who fish it, drill it, and live along its shores.
Denali was called that by the Koyukon Athabascan people whose territory it dominates for thousands of years before any European saw it. In 1917, a gold prospector named William Dickey renamed it Mount McKinley to honor the then-presidential candidate, without any consultation with the people who lived there. Alaska's state legislature voted to restore the name Denali in 1975. The federal government declined to follow until 2015. The Trump administration reversed the change by executive order on inauguration day.
The Kennedy Center was established by an act of Congress in 1964 as a living memorial to a president who had been assassinated the previous year. The legislation was explicit: the building was to serve as a memorial to John F. Kennedy and was to be known as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. That designation was made by the same branch of government that a federal judge in May 2026 ruled was the only branch with authority to change it.
The Pattern in History
The compulsion to rename the landscape after oneself is not a new phenomenon. It is among the oldest and most consistent behaviors of leaders who understand that control of memory is control of meaning.
Saparmurat Niyazov, who ruled Turkmenistan for two decades after its independence from the Soviet Union, renamed himself Turkmenbashi — Father of All Turkmen — and renamed the capital's streets, public buildings, airports, and the months of the calendar after himself and members of his family. January became Turkmenbashi. April became the name of his mother. He commissioned a golden statue of himself in the capital that rotated throughout the day so that his face would always be toward the sun. He authored a two-volume spiritual text called the Ruhnama, which he declared a sacred national scripture, and made it mandatory reading in schools, government offices, and for those seeking a driver's license. After his death in 2006, most of his portraits were removed from public buildings, the rotating statue was relocated, and the months were renamed again.
In 2019, Kazakhstan renamed its capital city Astana after its longtime president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, to Nur-Sultan. In January 2022, civil unrest shook the country. Nazarbayev's grip on power visibly weakened. By September 2022 — less than three years after the renaming — the city was Astana again. The reversal happened so quickly that cartographers were still updating their maps of the first change.
Stalin renamed Tsaritsyn to Stalingrad in 1925. After his death, Khrushchev renamed it Volgograd as part of de-Stalinization. The city has been debating the name ever since, with Russian legislators periodically voting to restore "Stalingrad" for specific commemorative occasions while the official name remains Volgograd. Leningrad became Saint Petersburg again in 1991. The history of authoritarian renaming is inseparable from the history of its reversal — because names that encode a single leader's claim on the landscape tend to survive only as long as that leader's claim does.
The historian Timothy Snyder has written that the control of the past is the first project of every authoritarian government, because the past is the source of the norms, the precedents, and the shared stories that make alternative futures imaginable. You cannot eliminate a norm if the people subject to it remember when it existed. You can, however, make it harder to remember — by replacing the names that carried it with names that carry something else.
What Is Being Erased
The executive order Trump signed on January 20, 2025 is titled "Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness." The framing is significant: renaming is presented not as replacement but as restoration — as the recovery of something that had been wrongly taken away. Mount McKinley is restored. The Gulf of America is not a new name but the correct name, recognized at last.
This framing does specific ideological work. It positions the act of renaming as an act of memory rather than an act of erasure — as fidelity to the past rather than revision of it. The people who named Denali after a gold prospector's preferred presidential candidate are honored. The people who named the mountain thousands of years before the gold prospector arrived are not. The Spanish colonizers who named the Gulf are erased. The Mexican and Cuban nations that share its shores are not consulted. The Indigenous people of the land are not mentioned.
What is being restored, in each case, is a specific claim about whose history counts — and the answer is consistent: the history that predates European arrival does not count, the history of nations that share geography with the United States does not count, the history of the Democratic administrations that made the most recent changes does not count. What counts is the history that can be claimed as American, defined narrowly enough to make room for the current administration's preferences.
The Kennedy Center is the starkest case because the history being displaced is so specific. Congress created the building to honor a murdered president. The legislation was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. The building has served that purpose for more than sixty years. A federal court has ruled that the authority to change this designation belongs to Congress, not to the executive branch. The administration's response has been to find a workaround — an inscription rather than a name change, which the DOJ argues is categorically different from the renaming the court prohibited.
"Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump" is seven words. They do not replace the Kennedy Center's name. They appear below it, in smaller type, on a building that has been under tarps since the original name-change attempt. What they do is insert a living president's claim of ownership and credit into a memorial that Congress dedicated to a dead one — claiming the work of renovation as sufficient grounds for permanent inscription on a building that will outlast any renovation.
The Workaround as Governance
The Kennedy Center story is worth dwelling on not because of the building specifically but because of the administrative method it illustrates — the same method that has appeared throughout the governance patterns this publication has been tracking all year.
A court rules that something is not permitted. The administration finds a structurally similar action that it argues falls outside the ruling's scope. The tarps stay up. The scaffolding remains. The workaround is appealed, litigated, and implemented while the litigation continues. The norm that the court ruling was designed to protect — in this case, congressional authority over congressionally designated memorials — is eroded through the accumulation of actions that individually claim to respect the ruling while collectively defeating its purpose.
This is the same pattern as the tariffs: the Supreme Court ruled the Section 122 tariffs unconstitutional, and new tariffs were announced under a different legal authority the same evening. It is the same pattern as the VRA: the court struck down the preclearance formula, and states redrew maps within hours. It is the same pattern as the federal workforce: individual reductions-in-force that collectively amount to a restructuring that would have required congressional authorization if done openly.
The renaming strategy follows this logic. The name change is blocked. An inscription is added. The inscription is challenged. An appeal is filed. The tarps remain. The administration has technically complied with the order while functionally pursuing the same outcome the order was designed to prevent. It is stealth authoritarianism applied to toponymy — the same hollowing of institutional constraint through procedural workaround that has characterized the administration's relationship to oversight across every domain.
What Names Survive
History offers some guidance on which names stick and which don't.
Gene Rhea Tucker, a professor of history at Temple College and a board member of the Texas Map Society, has observed that place-names generally endure when they are short and easy to pronounce, have no popular rival, and are tied to the land or its people rather than to a political system or a person. The Gulf of Mexico passes all three tests. The Gulf of America fails the third one definitively: it is tied not to the land or its people but to the political moment of a single administration, and it has a well-established rival that the world has used for four centuries.
Stalingrad reverted to Volgograd. Leningrad reverted to Saint Petersburg. Nur-Sultan reverted to Astana in less than three years. The pattern is not universal — some politically imposed names do stick, particularly when they are adopted by the local population over time — but the pattern for names imposed by a single leader's political will, over the objection of the people who use them, is strongly toward reversion once the political moment passes.
Most Americans, and most of the world, continue to call it the Gulf of Mexico. International maritime organizations have not changed their charts. Google Maps added a distinction for American users while retaining the original name for users elsewhere. The Mexican government has not recognized the change. The name the executive order imposed on federal agencies has not penetrated the language of the people whose body of water it is.
Denali was called the high one for thousands of years before a gold prospector named it after a politician. It was called Denali again for a decade before an executive order restored the politician's name. It will almost certainly be called Denali again — because the people who live near it, who have always lived near it, have been calling it that longer than any executive order has existed, and will be calling it that long after any executive order expires.
Names that carry people survive, names that carry only power tend to last exactly as long as the power does.
