Jan 11, 2025 By Richard Robbins 4 min read

President-elect Trump wants to rename the body of water south of New Orleans and west of Tampa. You know, that one that’s been called the Gulf of Mexico for the past 400 years.

Donald Trump likes the “Gulf of America” for the salt waters washing ashore at Mobile and on the coastline of Cuba. It has “a beautiful ring to it,” he says.

Sure does!

The next president – he takes office Jan. 20 – also has his eye on Greenland. He wants the place. The Danes, its owners, say the island, three times the size of Texas, is not for sale.

If the Danes hold fast, for the heck of it President Trump should do a unilateral name-change. How about “That Big, Beautiful Lump Of Ice With Tons Of Big, Beautiful Minerals That Should Belong To The United States Just Because It Should?”

A little long, but it makes the point. “The Isle of Drill, Baby, Drill” is shorter, and also makes the point.

Trump’s gaze has likewise been directed at the Panama Canal. The Panamanians, who suckered Jimmy Carter into giving up U.S. sovereignty in 1979, assert the canal will remain theirs. The president-elect has not ruled out using the military to enforce his will.

In the absence of a change of hands, maybe a change of names is in order. “Canal of Barron” sounds good. Or “Ivanka’s Way.” “Donald Junior’s Path Between the Seas” might work.

In fact, there are literally dozens of places that could use a sparkling new nomenclature in the coming Age of Trump II.

For instance: “Haitians Out, Pa.” for Charleroi. “Slackerope” for Europe, just because those slackers across the ocean refuse to pay their fair share for United States protection against the Russians.

As for Russia, maybe we should rename it “Putin’s Place.”

Not very funny, you may be thinking. Well, for head-scratching fun, how about these few excerpts from Donald Trump’s press conference last Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago?

Referring to Joe Biden, the next president insisted to reporters: “The guy loves electric…. He wants everyone to have an electric heater, instead of a gas heater. Gas is much less expensive. The heat is much better. It’s much better heat, as the expression goes. You don’t itch. Does anyone have a heater where you go and you’re scratching? That’s what they want to have.”

Again referencing Biden and the Democrats: “They also want to go back and they have already started that when you buy a faucet, no water comes out because they want to preserve. Even in areas that have so much water you don’t know what to do. It’s called rain, it comes down from heaven, and they want to do no water comes out of the shower. It goes drip, drip, drip. So what happens?”

The president-elect continued: “You’re in the shower ten times as long. No water comes out of the faucet, you want to wash your hands. They want to go back even stronger than what they have now. As you know, I ended that policy….”

But Democrats, the 45th and (soon) 47th president said, insist on doing it their way.

“Likewise, washing machines, they want your washing machine to have very little water coming out of the washing machine, so you wash your clothing, you have to wash … four times instead of once. You end up using more water.”

“I defeated ISIS, as you know,” President-elect Trump told the assembled journalists, “… We also got our soldiers guarding Syria and Turkey.

“… We had one army, over 300,000, we had another one, five or 600,000 looking, getting ready. We had 5,000 people in the middle. And I said to a general, ‘How do 5,000 do in that case?’ And the general just looked me and said, ‘Not very well, sir.'”

Reflecting on his forthcoming second term in the White House, the president-elect declared to reporters, “We’re now in an age of common sense.”

Yes, at this press conference Donald Trump did call the prime minister of Canada the “governor” of Canada. But that was only because he wants that big, beautiful country to our north to become the 51st state.

Seems logical to me.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com