Neither Trump nor the A.P. decide what we call the Gulf of Mexico

The Associated Press recently won in court, challenging President Donald Trump’s decision to exclude the news organization from the White House press pool. The dispute began over the president’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and the A.P.’s refusal to fully adopt the renaming in its style guide.

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden—a Trump appointee—ruled that the president’s unconstitutional actions amounted to viewpoint discrimination by the government. “The Court simply holds that under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists—be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere—it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints,” wrote McFadden in his decision. “The Constitution requires no less.”

Before this decision, Julie Pace, the A.P.’s executive editor and senior vice president, encouraged Americans to look at the big picture. “For anyone who thinks the Associated Press’s lawsuit against President Trump’s White House is about the name of a body of water, think bigger,” wrote Pace in The Wall Street Journal. “It’s really about whether the government can control what you say.”

Pace is spot-on. Americans shouldn’t lose sight of the big picture: The principles of free speech—codified by the First Amendment—protect individuals from an onerous, censorial government seeking to control what words citizens use. 

But this debate is bigger than overly spray-tanned authoritarians and fussy grammarians duking it out in court. 

Even Trump’s War on the Media Has Its Limits

Trump’s legal dispute with the A.P. is just one episode in his ongoing war against journalism, an institution he has called “the enemy of the people.”  

Though he often decries the “weaponization” of the judicial system, the president rarely passes up the opportunity to use lawfare as his go-to cudgel. Over the past three decades, Trump has been involved in more than 3,500 legal battles in federal and state courts, according to one report. In 2023 alone, Trump sued 20 media organizations. “The consistent theme is his willingness to use the court system, even as a public figure and a public official, to silence people, to force them to correct statements, to just generally make them uncomfortable,” Kevin Goldberg, vice president at Freedom Forum, a free speech organization, told Axios. 

And this litigious strategy has, for the most part, paid off for him.

In March 2024, Trump sued ABC News for George Stephanopoulos’s questions directed at Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) about her support for a president found “liable for rape by a jury.” (Technically, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse, not rape.) In December 2024, ABC settled a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump, agreeing to pay $15 million to his presidential library and $1 million in legal fees. 

Trump also filed a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS News’ parent company, Paramount Global, for a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. The president claimed video editors deceptively edited the footage, calling the segment a “news distortion” and accusing the show of engaging in “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference.” In addition to the suit against Paramount, the Trump administration has pursued a parallel Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigation into how 60 Minutes edited the Harris interview. 

But Trump’s authority, especially over the media, is far from limitless. 

Concerned about the partisan tables turning in the future, a coalition of center-right organizations—including the Center for Individual Freedom, Americans for Tax Reform, and Taxpayers Protection Alliance—encouraged the Trump administration to stop the FCC investigation of CBS, stating that an “adverse ruling against CBS would constitute regulatory overreach and advance precedent that can be weaponized by future FCCs.” 

Other right-leaning entities have also expressed their concern about blowback from a future, less ideologically aligned administration. Fox News and Newsmax, both vocal supporters of Trump, joined 40 other news organizations—many of whom Trump frequently refers to as “fake news“—in opposing Trump’s exclusion of the A.P. “We fear a future administration may not like something that Newsmax writes and seeks to ban us,” stated Newsmax representatives. “This is why news organizations like Newsmax and Fox News are supporting the A.P.’s First Amendment rights though we may disagree with its editorial point of view from time to time.” 

The A.P.’s legal victory draws a clear line in the sand that no amount of executive authority can cross. But the A.P. has its limits, too. 

To A.P. or Not to A.P.

The A.P. style is ubiquitous in journalism. Publications ranging from The Washington Post to Breitbart follow A.P. style. Truthfully, if Trump barred press access based on A.P. style guidance, very few outlets would remain in the White House press pool. 

But even adherents of the A.P. style don’t follow every single stylistic recommendation. Many have unique stylistic carveouts. Even Reason, which mostly follows the A.P.’s guidelines, maintains some bespoke exceptions. 

Even anti-Trump partisans don’t fully embrace all of the A.P.’s guidance. “You can’t get mad at the A.P. for not using your stupid name,” Stephen Colbert joked on The Late Show. “The thing you should get mad at the A.P. about is not using the Oxford comma in their style guide.”

Despite Trump’s claims, A.P. style neither bans using the Gulf of America nor fully endorses the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, the entry splits the difference, advising to “refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.” The A.P.’s guidance is no different than modifying references to other popular rebrands, such as X, or the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Interestingly, the A.P. aligns with Trump on his other controversial landmark rebranding: Mount McKinley, or the mountain formerly known as Denali. “The Associated Press will use the official name change to Mount McKinley,” wrote Amanda Barrett, the A.P.’s vice president of standards and inclusion. “The area lies solely in the United States and as president, Trump has the authority to change federal geographical names within the country.” 

Yet, local usage diverges from A.P. style. Only 26 percent of Alaska—a state that Trump won by 13 percentage points—supports the president’s name change. The 20,000-foot mountain is a source of local pride for Alaskans and represents the region’s indigenous culture, so their linguistic intransigence is understandable. Though the mountain’s “official” name has ping-ponged since 1917, Alaskans haven’t deviated from Denali. “In Alaska, it’s always been Denali,” Holly Cusack-McVeigh, an anthropologist at Indiana University, Indianapolis, explained in The Conversation. 

The same goes for the Gulf of America. A Reuters poll found seven out of ten Americans oppose renaming the Gulf of Mexico. Other polling mirrors these numbers. 

Geographic rebranding has often struggled to bridge the gap between officialdom and usage. Vietnamese people refer to their largest city as Saigon informally, but write Ho Chi Minh City on official documents. Though Myanmar attained its official name following the 1989 military junta, 68 percent of the country still uses the informal name Burma, with some claiming the name change “reeks of government” and is a “form of censorship.” India has also struggled with city names, such as Mumbai and Kolkata, because of its colonial past. 

Language doesn’t abide by official proclamations. Instead, popular usage—or, as defined by the Chicago Manual of Style, “the collective habits of a language’s native speakers”—owns the naming rights. Moreover, usage better reflects human communication. 

The Spontaneous Order of Language

Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” The same can be said about the limits of power. 

Language lacks a central authority. Neither the traditional literary gatekeepers (e.g., linguists, lexicographers, and grammarians) nor political leaders (especially the ones barking Orwellian newspeak like “tariffs are tax cuts“) are the final arbiters of how humanity communicates. 

Instead, language follows the principles of creative destruction and spontaneous order—the social phenomena long championed by classical liberals and libertarians. Words are the currency of the marketplace of ideas. Their values ebb and flow like tickers on the stock exchange—and arguably have more value than most 401(k)s at the moment. Newly coined terms gain value as they capture this moment in time better than old words. This is why words like doggo and bussin’ now grace the pages of Merriam-Webster.

But this moment is always fleeting, and dictionaries and style guides offer only a snapshot of a unique time in language. Today’s neologisms will soon become tomorrow’s cliches. And this ceaseless linguistic churning will wax and wane until we disappear as a species. 

Until then, language remains the final frontier of human liberty, and no amount of coercion can genuinely contain it.