The Gulf Between Trump and the Press

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When President Trump signed an order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” back in January, I couldn’t stop thinking about a scene from the 2004 teen classic Mean Girls, in which queen bee Regina George snaps at Gretchen Weiner, her underling, for trying to make the word fetch a synonym for cool. (“Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen!” Regina says. “It’s not going to happen!”) That’s about how seriously I took Executive Order 14172, even after both Google Maps and Apple Maps instituted the change, at least for US users. The Associated Press, it seems, was on the same page as me: two days after the order was signed, the agency issued an update to its stylebook—which is widely followed throughout the news business—recommending the continued use of the original name, though it would acknowledge the new name as well. “Trump’s order only carries authority within the United States. Mexico, as well as other countries and international bodies, do not have to recognize the name change,” the AP reasoned in an announcement about the decision. “As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.” (In the same executive order, Trump changed the official name of Denali, a peak in Alaska that had been renamed in 2015 to align with local tradition, to “Mount McKinley.” The AP said that it would adopt this change, since the area is solely within the US and Trump therefore has authority over it.) 

But Trump, it turned out, was determined to make “Gulf of America” happen. Last week, an AP reporter was blocked from attending the signing of an executive order in the Oval Office; later in the day, Julie Pace, its executive editor, wrote in a statement that she had been informed that the decision was the White House’s response to the new stylebook guidance. “It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism,” she wrote. “Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.” When asked about the incident at a press briefing the following day, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that “it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America, and I’m not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that.” AP reporters were blocked from other official events last week, then prevented from accompanying Trump to Florida on Air Force One with the rest of the press pool. After that incident, Taylor Budowich, a White House deputy chief of staff, accused the AP of “misinformation” and rejected the agency’s constitutional defense, writing on X that the First Amendment “does not ensure their privilege of unfettered access to limited spaces.” This week, Trump himself confirmed that the ban will endure as long as the AP refuses to back down.

It wasn’t immediately obvious why Trump chose to single out the AP: other outlets have refused to follow the “Gulf of America” play, and as Paul Farhi pointed out in a piece for CJR earlier this week, the wire service is not known for its editorial slant. It’s “hard to find a more blameless victim,” Farhi wrote, adding that the issue “seems like a petty pretext for pushing around the press.” This remains true—though it turns out that the White House may have singled out the AP for a reason after all. As Axios reported on Monday, Trump supporters had already been stewing over the AP’s stylebook, which includes phrases like “gender-affirming care” and discourages the use of “illegal immigrant” to refer to people who came to the United States without documentation. (“Use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant,” the stylebook recommends.) Budowich confirmed that the banning was about more than Executive Order 14172, telling Axios that the “AP [was] weaponizing language through their stylebook to push a partisan worldview in contrast with the traditional and deeply held beliefs of many Americans and many people around the world.”

That said, the barring of the AP is only one of a number of shake-ups to have hit the White House press corps and its counterparts at other agencies. The new administration has reassigned dedicated office space in the Pentagon that was formerly used by outlets including NPR, NBC, and the New York Times to right-wing outlets including Breitbart and One America News (and, weirdly, HuffPost); this week, Axios reported that Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, two right-wing radio hosts and successors to Rush Limbaugh, have been invited to broadcast from the building. The administration has also reserved space in the White House briefing room for nontraditional media, including podcasters and influencers. The administration wants to appear as though it is giving access to voices that would otherwise be locked out of the national conversation—though Jake Lahut wrote for CJR this week that “‘new media’ seat holders won’t exactly be breaking down barriers”; the briefing room, he explained, was already “open to any member of the press who requests temporary access.” In the end, “by elevating friendly right-wing provocateurs to an equal footing with more mainstream, established voices,” Lahut wrote, “officials are also making it clear who they’re more interested in hearing from—and the type of question they’re interested in being asked.”

The AP situation remains unresolved. On Wednesday, Status reported that forty news organizations, including the generally MAGA-aligned outlets Fox News and Newsmax, signed a White House Correspondents’ Association letter in support of the AP, part of a broader pushback that has mostly played out quietly, behind the scenes. Others have called for more drastic action, including the former CNN anchor Jim Acosta, who wrote that other press outlets should refuse to attend briefings in solidarity. Farhi, however, believes this would be a mistake. “A mass boycott of the briefings in protest,” he wrote, “seems not just unlikely but also unworkable and unwise”; a walkout could go unnoticed if right-wing outlets continue to report from the briefing room, and mainstream outlets would in that eventuality be sacrificing the valuable opportunity to ask Leavitt hard questions. The best course of action, according to Farhi, is for reporters to keep reporting. The AP, meanwhile, seems to be weighing its options. Earlier this week, Pace traveled to Florida to meet with Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff. A lawsuit remains a possibility. Already, reporters and scholars are vigorously debating whether the AP would have a First Amendment case should it decide to take the White House to court. The answer seems to be that it would—though the issues involved are complicated.

At least some of the theatricality of the Gulf of America v. Gulf of Mexico debate comes from how deeply inconsequential it appears to be on the surface. There are, of course, places in the world where the names reporters choose to use have political implications: “Turkey” or “Türkiye,” for example, and in Palestine and Israel, where the choice of whether to call the territory to the west of the Jordan River “the West Bank” or “Judea and Samaria” reflects, by extension, how you feel about the Geneva Convention. This situation does not have the same geopolitical charge (though Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico, is reportedly considering a lawsuit against Google for instituting Trump’s name change across the whole body of water, rather than the part of it the US controls). The matter does have the potential to set a troubling precedent in terms of how the president relates to the press, as Pace wrote when the AP was first barred from the Oval. Ultimately, Trump is asserting ownership and making a show of his authority to do so. As far as he’s concerned, there is only one qQueen bBee. You can read Farhi’s piece here.

Other notable stories:

• Yesterday, the Senate confirmed Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, in a narrow fifty-one to forty-nine vote; two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, defected, with the latter citing Patel’s recent history of “high-profile and aggressive political activity.” Among other things, Patel has threatened to “come after” members of the media, as we noted after Trump nominated him. And yet, as Oliver Darcy noted in Status overnight, major news outlets were “exceedingly gentle” in their characterizations of Patel yesterday, highlighting his loyalty to Trump over his extreme views. (“Of course Patel is a Trump loyalist—that’s precisely why he was chosen!” Darcy writes. “That’s not news!”)

• This week, Italy’s national union of journalists filed a criminal complaint after Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government refused to respond to questions about how a spyware program called Graphite ended up on the phone of Francesco Cancellato, an investigative journalist. Earlier this month, The GThe Guardian revealed that Paragon Solutions, the owner of Graphite, had terminated a contract with the Italian government following the revelation that the journalist and two other activists had been infected with spyware. This, The Guardian reported, violated the terms of Italy’s contract with the company. 

• And in other AP news, Pace announced in a staff email on Thursday that the organization would be rolling out a new program to support local news initiatives. The Local Investigative Reporting Program, she wrote, will train newsrooms in investigative techniques and will support them with AP editors and experts.

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Yona TR Golding was a CJR fellow.