Ohio officials this week goaded President Donald Trump with a snarky name change to a portion of Lake Erie, after the president sought to rename another one of the Great Lakes.
The Cleveland City Council renamed a section of Lake Erie as the “Gulf of Cleveland,” in a jab at Trump’s recent executive order declaring that Lake Ontario be called “Lake America.” The emergency resolution passed in a 13-1 vote. The ceremonial action is not legally binding and applies only in Cleveland, but it requires the city clerk to ask Apple and other national mapping companies to make the change.
“President Trump’s orders to assign new names without reference to history, tradition, and other acts of Congress have opened the door for United States officials to rename other geography,” Councilman Kris Harsh, who led the resolution, said in a cheeky speech. “It kind of stunned me that people could be this distracted. So, I was staring at the lake one day and thinking, gosh, the Gulf of Cleveland has a really nice ring to it.”
The resolution applies to the 2-mile stretch of water from the city shoreline, from its eastern to its western borders. Any new city-generated maps and documents will now refer to that portion of the lake as the Gulf of Cleveland.
In a satirical monologue Monday pushing for the change, Harsh mocked Trump for mandating the Gulf of Mexico be called the “Gulf of America” last year and criticized the president for suggesting New Mexico be called “New America.”
“I feel emboldened to take the extraordinary step of renaming Lake Erie as the Gulf of Cleveland, today,” he said. “I made a map. There it is. This is all it takes. It’s now the Gulf of Cleveland.”
“There are serious problems in this country, and yes, I am making fun of the fact that he likes to spend time renaming bodies of water,” Harsh added in a more serious moment. “But I hope that the joke lands in a way that people realize we’ve got to get off this foolishness and start focusing on things that matter here in the city.”
The Kennedy Center in Washington and Palm Beach International Airport in Florida are among other places that Trump has sought to rename after himself, or that officials have decided to rename in honor of the president. Some changes have received significant pushback in courts, as has happened in the case of the Kennedy Center. The Palm Beach airport is now the President Donald J. Trump International Airport.
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When it came to Trump floating the idea of renaming New Mexico “New America,” the backlash was swift.
“New Mexico’s name isn’t up for debate — it’s been ours since before the United States existed,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM) said.