US President Donald Trump has claimed that Google chief executive Sundar Pichai talked him out of renaming the Atlantic Ocean, warning that such a move could offend several countries.
Speaking at a rally in South Carolina on Wednesday, Trump said he had considered changing the name of the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean after his proposal to call Lake Ontario “Lake America”.
“Recently, I changed the name of a lake … you know the lake. But I did it very lightly. And the damn thing got changed, actually. That's power, right? When you sort of do it half-heartedly, and it gets changed, it's changed. It's called the Lake of America,” he said.
Trump said he shared his idea of changing the name of the Atlantic Ocean with Pichai, the Indian-American CEO of Google.
“I spoke to a brilliant guy, Sundar. He heads all of Google. He's a brilliant guy. Sergei and Sundar. Totally brilliant guys,” he said in an apparent reference to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google.
“And, you know, they're still rattled from the Gulf. And I said, ‘Sundar, I'm thinking of the Atlantic Ocean. Can you handle it?’” Trump told the gathering, referring to his decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
Recounting Pichai's response, Trump said the Google CEO had told him that oceans were different because they covered many countries and asked him not to pursue the idea.
“So, I'll probably pass it,” Trump said.
During his address, he also toyed with the idea of changing the names of rivers such as the Hudson or Mississippi to America.
“So, we have a lake, and we have a Gulf. Now we need a river and we need an ocean. So, I was thinking of the Hudson River, and I thought of the Mississippi,” Trump said, adding that he would not go ahead with renaming the rivers.
On Monday, in a Truth Social post, Trump called for New Mexico to be renamed, saying the state is part of the United States, not Mexico. "We are not Mexico, we are the United States of America!" Trump wrote.
Trump's latest call to change the name of the state comes a little over a month after he shared maps on social media depicting New Mexico as "New America."
The name New Mexico dates back to the 1500s, when the region was named Nuevo Mexico by Spanish settlers. The name therefore predates both the United States and modern-day Mexico as independent countries. New Mexico was an incorporated territory of the United States until becoming the 47th state in 1912.