President Donald Trump has renewed his push to rechristen either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean as “Trump Ocean” before his second term ends.
The 80-year-old commander-in-chief floated the massive rebranding proposal during a rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, where he told a roaring crowd that securing an ocean rename would cap his ongoing overhaul of North American geography. Trump, who has already ordered federal agencies to adopt “Gulf of America” and targeted Lake Ontario for rechristening, framed the ocean plan as the logical next escalation in his cartographic crusade.
“So we’ve got the Gulf. We’ve got a beautiful lake. Now somebody you need a river,” Trump told the crowd. “I don’t want to change the name of the Hudson River. That’s too much. Henry Hudson did a good job setting up that sucker a long time ago.”
Turning to vastly larger targets, he continued: “So we need a river and we need an ocean, so I was thinking of either the Atlantic or the Pacific. We’ll call it Trump Ocean or Ocean of the Americas.”
The president made clear he intends to see the shift enacted before leaving office. “We should have—before I get out, I think we should have a ocean or we need a great river,” he insisted at the rally. He offered one reassurance to attendees: “Now I’m not changing the name of the Mississippi.”
This was far from the first airing of the ocean proposal. Trump initially floated the idea back in August during remarks to reporters in the Oval Office. “We have a gulf and we have a lake,” he said at the time. “Now all we need is an ocean. Maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”
The August remarks came after Trump had already expanded his renaming push to Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes shared between the United States and Canada. In a video shared to TikTok on August 26, he declared that “all it takes is a good pen and some intelligence,” famously taking a black Sharpie to a physical map to cross out the original name and replace it with “LAKE AMERICA.”
The ocean proposal marks the latest stage in Trump’s broader effort to reshape American cartography under his “America First” agenda. Shortly after his second inauguration in January 2025, he ordered federal agencies to replace the Gulf of Mexico with the “Gulf of America,” calling it a “beautiful name” that covers significant territory. Foreign neighbors including Mexico and Cuba have maintained standard international naming conventions despite the U.S. Shift.
Trump has also reversed an Obama-era decision regarding North America’s tallest peak, stripping away the Indigenous Alaskan title of Denali to restore its previous federal name, Mount McKinley, honoring the nation’s 25th president.
The Tennessee rally saw Trump casting the ocean rename as a capstone achievement for his second administration, placing it alongside his existing waterway victories while drawing a firm line at the Hudson River’s historical legacy.