Donald Trump has already renamed the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America", claimed Lake Ontario should be called "Lake America", and now he's revealed he considered extending the campaign to the Atlantic Ocean, but ran into a refusal from Google.
At a rally before supporters, less than two weeks before the US midterm elections, the president said he seriously examined the possibility of renaming the ocean that separates America from Europe.
According to Trump, he even discussed the matter with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. "I told him: I'm thinking about the Atlantic Ocean, can you handle that?" Trump recounted. But Pichai, he said, declined: "No, no, no. This time I'm not doing it. Oceans are something else, sir. They span many countries. Please, don't ask us to do this."
Trump told the story with humor, and ultimately announced he would likely abandon the idea. "So we'll probably drop it. We'll stick with the Atlantic Ocean," he said.
But behind the unusual initiatives lies, according to a French strategy expert, a broader conception. Maud Quissard, who heads the Europe, Trans-Atlantic Space and Russia division at the Strategic Research Institute of France's military academy, has explained that Trump's ambitions focus not only on territory, but also on control of infrastructure and axes of influence.
According to her, changing names on maps allows the president to present his vision as if it has already become reality. "The map becomes a tool in the story he tells about his power," she explained, noting that these kind of moves are made while ignoring international law and the bodies responsible for standardizing geographic names.
