Ink Tea Stone Leaf

So yeah. The Gulf of Mexico has been in the news. Not because anything happened there, but because of a baby’s fit of pique.

I’m on the record in multiple forums stating that Donald Trump is a fascist, that we’ve had reason to believe this for well over a decade, that we’ve known it for certainty since he ran for President in 2016, and that his continued presence in our politics carries with it the risk of a malicious degradation of every good principle upon which democracy depends. These are things that everybody knows, even if they don’t care about things like “democracy,” or are emotionally incapable of saying it out loud.

But never let it be forgotten that in addition to all this, he is a very stupid man who says stupid shit and follows stupid priorities. The man is incapable of being evil without simultaneously being eye-rollingly, mind-numbingly idiotic. This is why he decided halfway through the transition, out of the wild-fucking-blue, that any association of the very large body of ocean water to the south of the U.S. with our very large southern neighbor is a grave historical injustice, requiring his immediate attention. He wants us to call it “the Gulf of America” now.

This is the kind of politics that appeals to superficial, stupid people, and the kind that people who know which side their bread is buttered on will defend as they eagerly await more policies for the immiseration of trans people. The Gulf of Mexico bit was tossed in with other executive orders aimed at curtailing transgender rights, giving more government jobs to unqualified white men, undermining the legal basis of U.S. citizenship, making global climate change worse on purpose, and illegally impounding trillions of dollars of federal spending, among other things I’m too tired to list. Renaming the Gulf isn’t a plank of Project 2025 per se, but the kind of people who think that the problem with our system of government is that the President must sometimes face effective opposition from the other branches of government aren’t going to object to it merely for being pointless and arbitrary.

The Gulf of Mexico has been the Gulf of Mexico for longer than there has been a nation that called itself “America,” a word which has always been geographically ambiguous. None of the thirteen colonies had coastlines on the Gulf, and nearly all of the current U.S. coastline there was acquired from Spain and Mexico. Mexico still has the longer coastline along the Gulf, for whatever that is worth. None of this is worth anything really, because the nomenclature of major geographic features in the 21st century is not supposed to be a proxy for lazy nationalism and imperial fantasies.

Whatever the Gulf of Mexico is called, it does nothing to help the people Trump repeatedly lies about wanting to help. It doesn’t even hurt the people he most enjoys hurting, which often includes the previous group. It has roughly the same impact on the world as if the “freedom fries” of the Congressional cafeteria circa 2003 were mandated to be served in every American public school. It’s a branding stunt by a man who believes that everything is ultimately reducible to branding, and the object of life is to stamp your name or flag onto everything you can get hold of.

So I won’t be calling the Gulf of Mexico anything except “the Gulf of Mexico,” because I thoroughly disrespect Donald Trump and all the works of his infantile mind. Anybody who complies with that guy’s nonsense will be accordingly lowered in my esteem. I call on the International Hydrography Organization to hold the line against the dullest turd of the month, and I call on the American people not to let the president’s feeble-mindedness distract you from his mendacity and malignance. He has plenty more of all three in store for us.