President-elect Donald Trump said in a left-field proposal Tuesday that his administration will designate the Gulf of Mexico “America’s Gulf” in the latest attack on Mexico.
“We’re going to change because we do most of the work there and it’s ours,” Trump said. “It’s right, and Mexico needs to stop pouring millions of people into our country,” Trump said in a long and winding press conference.
Trump criticized Mexico for increasing drug trafficking in the US and said he would pay Mexico and Canada “through high tariffs”.
President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago on January 7, 2024 in Palm Beach, Florida.
Evan Vucci/AP
“We want to get along with everybody. But you know… it takes two to tango,” he said.
The Gulf has been identified by various names throughout its history, the “Gulf of Mexico” first appeared on maps in the 16th century. In the middle of the 19th century, Spain occupied the areas known today as Cuba in the south, Mexico in the west, and the US states. The ones that surround it to the north.
The Gulf of Mexico is one of the largest and most important bodies of water in North America. It is the ninth largest body of water in the world and covers about 600,000 square kilometers.
Half of the U.S.’s oil refining and natural gas processing capacity is in the Gulf, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and it supplies about 40 percent of the nation’s seafood.
Its more than 17.2 million acres of marshland and nearly 30,000 miles of shoreline draw millions of tourists to the area each year. says NOAAand hundreds of species of fish live there.
Trump’s promise to rename the gulf is not the first.
In 2012, then Mississippi State Representative Steve Holland proposed the bill that would have also renamed the gulf “America’s Gulf,” but the Democrat backtracked and said he was joking and using it as a way to criticize his Republican colleagues for their anti-immigrant stance.
“They’re really trying to discriminate against immigrants, and that really offends me,” Hollande told ABC News in 2012. “I thought if we’re going to get into it, we’re all going to get into it, it’s just tongue in cheek. .”
Stephen Colbert suggested the same name in reference to the 2010 BP oil spill on his Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report.”
“We broke it, we bought it,” he joked.
