(PALM BEACH, Fla.) — President-elect Donald Trump declared in a left-field proposal on Tuesday that his administration will rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” in his 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 appropriate, and Mexico has to stop allowing millions of people to pour into our country,” Trump said in a long, winding news conference.
Trump criticized Mexico for the increase of drugs into the U.S. and said that he would make Mexico and Canada pay through “substantial tariffs.”
“We want to get along with everybody. But you know … it takes two to tango,” he said.
The gulf has been identified by several names throughout its history, with “Golfo de Mexico” first appearing on maps in the mid-16th century when Spain occupied the areas now known as Cuba to the south, Mexico to the west and the the U.S. states that surround it to the North.
It’s the ninth-largest body of water in the world and covers some 600,000 square miles.
Trump’s promise to rename the gulf isn’t the first.
In 2012, then-Mississippi State Rep. Steve Holland proposed a bill that also would have renamed the gulf into the “Gulf of America,” however the Democrat backtracked and said he was joking and using it as a way to criticize his Republican colleagues over their anti-immigrant stances.
“They are trying to really discriminate against immigrants, which offends me severely,” Holland told ABC News in 2012. “I just thought if we’re gonna get into it, we might as well all get into it, it’s purely tongue and cheek.”
Stephen Colbert suggested the same name during the 2010 BP oil spill on his Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report.”
“We broke it, we bought it,” he joked.
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