Trump Promises to Rename Gulf of Mexico on Day One as President

Donald Trump will rename the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali by executive order in one of his first acts as president. 

The news broke shortly before he was sworn in Monday morning, and Trump confirmed it during his inaugural address. The order will rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and Mount Denali to Mount McKinley, which was the official name recognized by the federal government from 1917 until 2015. 

Trump first announced his plans to rename the gulf nearly two weeks ago in a rambling press conference, saying, “We’re gonna be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America…. What a beautiful name. And it’s appropriate…. Mexico has to stop allowing millions of people to pour into our country. They can stop them.”

Not long after that declaration, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum held a news conference of her own where she asked, “Why don’t we call it Mexican America? It sounds pretty, no?”

Denali is the tallest mountain in North America, and gained its name from the Koyukon Athabaskans, the original inhabitants of Alaska. A gold prospector gave it the name McKinley in 1896 as a show of support for William McKinley, who was running for president at the time, and the federal government made the name official in 1917. In 1975, the state of Alaska sought to have the name changed, only to be blocked by Ohio politicians supporting their native son McKinley. 

In 2015, President Obama officially renamed the mountain to what Alaska natives had called it for centuries. Last month, though, Trump told supporters in a speech in Arizona that he would  “bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it.”

Trump could also be making the move because he wants to stick it to Obama, or because he admires McKinley’s imperialism. In any case, changing both names will be costly to U.S. taxpayers, and serve no strategic purpose whatsoever. It’s the first of likely many more pointless moves in the new Trump administration.

Trump wants to carry out another “manifest destiny” —but this time on Mars..

“We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars,” the newly inaugurated president said on Monday to the audience gathered in the Capitol Rotunda, who reacted to his comments with a standing ovation. “Ambition is the lifeblood of a great nation. And right now our nation is more ambitious than any other. There’s no nation like our nation.”

“Manifest destiny” was the violent, presumptuous 19th century idea that white American settlers had some religious obligation to seize Native land in the West, to convert Native Americans to Christianity, and to exploit the region’s ample resources.

Trump’s Mars pledge elicited a huge grin and enthusiastic double thumbs up from billionaire and top Mars colonization enthusiast Elon Musk, who has been pushing his Mars colony agenda for nearly a decade via his SpaceX company.

Donald Trump used his inauguration speech to whine about tech billionaires’ homes being burnt down. 

During his address Monday, Trump whined about the federal government’s response to natural disasters. 

“Our country can no longer deliver basic services in times of emergency,” he groused. 

Trump cited people in North Carolina still struggling from the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. In Los Angeles, “we are watching fires still tragically burn from weeks ago without even a token of defense,” Trump said. 

“They’re raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country. Some of whom are sitting here right now,” Trump said, smiling slightly at the reminder of his Silicon Valley invites, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai. 

“They don’t have a home any longer,” Trump mused. “That’s interesting.”

In fact, not a single one of these men appear to have lost their home in the Los Angeles wildfires. 

Crucially, these aren’t the kinds of guys who can lose a lot by losing just one residence: each one owns an extensive property portfolio worth hundreds of million dollars. Bezos’s is worth $500 million, and Zuckerberg’s is $200 million. Meanwhile, Musk owns several properties, though his primary home is a $50,000 tiny home in Texas, near SpaceX’s headquarters. So maybe the president could save his tears for the people who have lost their actual homes.  

Rather than actually acknowledging the devastating and widespread impacts of natural disasters, Trump’s comment merely suggests his special affinity for tech billionaires. After all, it’s Trump and his fellow Republicans who are ensuring those affected by the wildfires stay struggling by insisting that no disaster aid will be provided to California until the state agrees to reinstall Trump-era policies. 

With just minutes left as president, Joe Biden on Monday pardoned his entire immediate family—and gave clemency to prominent Native American activist Leonard Peltier.

Biden pardoned his younger brother James Biden, his sister-in-law Sarah Biden, his younger sister Valerie Biden Owens, his brother-in-law John Owens, and his younger brother Francis Biden “FOR ANY NONVIOLENT OFFENSES against the United States which they may have committed or taken part in during the period from January I, 2014, through the date of this pardon.”

Biden also commuted the sentence of Peltier. While he did not receive a pardon, he will be serving the rest of his life sentence in home confinement. Peltier is an indigenous activist affiliated with the American Indian Movement, which sought to address police brutality against Native people. He was sentenced in 1975 for the murder of two FBI agents during a shooting on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Peltier is now 80 years old, in ailing health, and has maintained his innocence throughout his nearly 50 years behind bars. Even one of the former federal prosecutors who put Peltier behind bars, James Reynolds, thinks that he’s innocent.

“We were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the reservation. As a result to Mr. Peltier’s conviction, now arrest, is that he was guilty of a murder simply because he was present on the reservation that day,” Reynolds wrote in a letter to Biden. “He has served time for more than 46 years on the hands of minimal evidence, a result I strongly doubt would be upheld in any court today.”

This story has been updated.

Melania Trump’s meme cryptocurrency launched Sunday night, skyrocketing in value and netting her a tidy profit only hours before she returns to the White House as first lady.

In an X post, Trump posted a photo of herself with the caption “The Official Melania Meme is live! You can buy $MELANIA now.” The price of the coin went to $12 in a matter of hours, with a market cap of more than $12 billion.

At the same time, Donald Trump’s meme coin, $TRUMP, launched on Friday, plummeted more than 40 percent. His coin had a very auspicious start, becoming the second-largest meme coin based on market cap. But right after his wife’s coin launch, the president-elect’s coin lost more than $7.5 billion in value.

The windfall for both Trumps, coming right before the inauguration, is a sign that profiteering from the president and first lady will occur unabated by ethical concerns or worries about the Constitution’s emoluments clause. The new president has said he plans to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet,” and his cryptocurrency ventures are taking in millions from shady sources.

Many of Trump’s appointees are a nod to the crypto industry, including David Sacks as A.I. and crypto czar and Paul Atkins as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Crypto investors spent millions of dollars getting Trump elected—and billions of dollars will flow into the cryptocurrency for the next four years.

Any cryptocurrency regulations will likely be ones that appease crypto investors and ensure that the money continues flooding into the pockets of the president, first lady, and their friends and supporters. The grift is now official policy.