What’s in a rename?
As insane as some of Donald Trump’s policy proposals first appear, many acquire a certain logic on closer examination. Greenland, with only 56,000 people, has mineral wealth as essential to the weaponry of the twenty-first century as South Africa’s uranium was to that of the twentieth. The place really may require exceptional treatment, as Trump suggests. Meanwhile, the US Agency for International Development actually did drift so far into propaganda and election interference that zeroing out its budget came to seem sensible. But there are other policies on which the halo of idiocy still burns as bright as it did on the day the President first proposed them. Chief among these is the executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.
