The latest update from the world according to Donald Trump is that he’s not allowed to rename the Atlantic Ocean after himself, despite asking Google’s boss if he could.
Speaking yesterday (21 October) at a rally in South Carolina, Trump made the claim that he’d spoken with Google CEO Sundar Pichai with the suggestion that maps of the world could do with a ‘Trump Ocean’.
He said: “We seriously looked at the Atlantic Ocean, I called Google Maps who were really great with the lake, really great and I spoke to a brilliant guy, Sundar, he heads all of Google, he’s a brilliant guy, Sergey and Sundar, totally brilliant guys.
“And I said Sundar I’m thinking of the Atlantic Ocean can you handle it?
“‘No, no, no this time I’m not doing it,’ he said. ‘Oceans are different, sir. They cover really a lot of countries please don’t ask us to do that.’”
Donald Trump said he’d asked Google about changing the Atlantic Ocean to be named after him, but they said no (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Playing to the crowd at the rally, Trump asked whether this was an ambition he ought to leave for now and leave the Atlantic Ocean the way it was.
Fortunately it sounds like he’s not planning on taking this one further, unlike some of his previous attempts to get bodies of water named after the US.
Very shortly after his second term as president started, Trump declared that he was going to start calling the Gulf of Mexico the ‘Gulf of America’, and got Google to change it according to his demands.
At least for Americans.
Google’s solution was for users in the US to see ‘Gulf of America’, while those in Mexico would see the name Gulf of Mexico stay in place, and for everyone else it shows up as Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America).
Trump said he’d asked Google boss Sundar Pichai, and been told an entire ocean was too much to change (Tierney L. Cross/The Washington Post/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The rest of the world hasn’t gone along with Trump’s insistence on the change in name, but it hasn’t deterred him.
He has since tried renaming Lake Ontario to ‘Lake America’, and even had big pictures with his preferred name on them shown in the White House.
Once again Google changed it according to Trump’s wishes for Americans only, retaining the proper name for Canadians while the rest of the world sees the lake’s actual name and then what Trump wants it to be called in brackets.
Both of these changes have come because of the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), an organisation in the US which works with the US Board on Geographic Names (BGN) to set out the standard names for places in America.
Because Trump got them to recognise his names for the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario it means Google has had to follow suit, as they said they have to ‘reflect name changes in official government sources’.
LADbible Group has contacted Google for comment.
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