The Dems may roll their eyes, WaPo and the NYT may pontificate all they like, the boys at the Bulwark may call it gauche and uncalled for, but Trump has spoken, and the deed is done. As of last weekend, Google Maps is labeling the easternmost of the Great Lakes as Lake America, as opposed to that other name it had — I forget what it was.
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The name-changing game began a little over 60 years ago. In 1958, China dumped the earlier, perfectly serviceable Wade-Giles transliteration system for the homemade Pinyin system, magically turning “Peking” into “Beijing,” among many other changes, most of them trivial. Pinyin was accepted internationally in 1979. Renaming soon became popular among other underdeveloped, authoritarian, and communist states, largely for the purpose of messing with the West. So we got “Myanmar” for Burma and “Kampuchea” for Cambodia. It was amusing, in a morbid kind of way, to see people backtracking from “Kampuchea” in the late 70s after it was revealed that the Khmer Rouge had murdered something on the order of two million people.
In later decades, we got more Westernized states such as India leaping in, with Bombay becoming “Mumbai” and so forth. The practice entered the Western world itself as a byproduct of the PC era, with place names changed from those taken as being ethnically demeaning or else rechristened with the aboriginal names. At times this led to own goals, such as a national campaign to rename all landmarks featuring “squaw” on the grounds that it was a degrading name for Native American women. In fact, it only succeeded in destroying the only recognition these women ever had. Nicely played.
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The name-craze has receded in recent years. In 2025, Mt Denali, officially changed by the Obama administration (who else?) returned to its name of Mt. McKinley. It’s easy to see this being reversed by a future Democrat administration. Who needs a mountain named after a Republican?
But Donald Trump, as is his habit, has overturned the table with his changes. And that’s fine. Call the exercise trivial if you must, but then consider the nature of the people who started it. The communists, the petty tyrants, and the PC crowd were doing it for their own reasons. Turnabout is fair play. So, long live the Gulf of America and Lake America.
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Image generated by ChatGPT.