During a press conference last Tuesday, United States President Donald Trump startled the audience by proposing to rename the Atlantic Ocean.
“I’ve always believed,” Trump stated, “that it is manifestly unfair that only one country on this planet has an ocean named after it, and even more unfair that that country is India. In order to remedy this deplorable—I hope that’s the word I want—state of affairs, I hereby order the renaming of the Atlantic Ocean as the American Ocean.”
When asked if he had plans to rename any other bodies of water, Trump replied: “I’m also considering a new name for the Pacific Ocean. At the moment I’m not sure whether we should call it The Other American Ocean or The Trump Ocean. We might also want to call the Indian Ocean The Really Far Away American Ocean, although I’m sure the Indians wouldn’t appreciate it too much. Still, effective diplomacy can accomplish a lot, as I have shown time and time again.”
Responses to President Trump’s proclamation have been mixed, with Republicans praising it as, in the words of John Plymouth Eisengeigen, “a brilliant piece of thoughtful and effective diplomacy” and Democrats decrying it as “another piece of absolute megalomaniacal lunacy—not that we’d expect anything less from a man who doesn’t know how to use lower-case letters” (Cheri Q. Ross).
“Big Cheese in Caerphilly,” by Jaggery. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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