What Trump’s Gulf of America obsession is really all about

On Tuesday afternoon the White House blocked an Associated Press reporter from attending an Oval Office Q&A with Trump and Elon Musk because the newswire hasn’t changed its stylebook entry for Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America.”

The restriction “plainly violates the First Amendment,” AP executive editor Julie Pace said, signaling a likely legal challenge.

“Punishing journalists for not adopting state-mandated terminology is an alarming attack on press freedom. That’s viewpoint discrimination, and it’s unconstitutional,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said in a statement.

Later in the day another AP reporter was “barred from a late-evening event in the White House Diplomatic Room,” the wire service said. So this was not just a one-off. It is a standoff.

And it’s part of a much larger weaponization of language to advance the Trump administration’s agenda.

The AP supplies information to newsrooms across the country, and its stylebook is an industry standard, so the White House action was also a warning to the wider world of media and technology.

The president evidently wants journalists to obey his guidance; repeat his words; follow his rules. Outlets that don’t fall in line might lose access.

Editors and reporters are wondering aloud if the administration will next penalize news outlets that acknowledge the existence of transgender people or cite data from purged government databases.

Out with the ‘oldspeak’

Trump’s “first order of business was to dispense with the oldspeak,” New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh wrote Tuesday, referencing George Orwell’s “1984.” In its place “is a new vocabulary,” McCreesh wrote, “containing many curious uses of doublespeak.”

Trump, for instance, said he “stopped government censorship” and simultaneously policed language around gender, diversity and immigration.

In the past few weeks his administration has deleted the White House’s Spanish-language website; stated that the government recognizes “only two genders;” and directed agencies to eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts.

As a result of Trump’s edicts, employees have been fired; websites have been removed; and scientific papers have been withdrawn.

Language is at the heart of this overhaul. At agencies like the National Science Foundation, workers reviewed active projects with a list of keywords “to determine if they include activities that violate executive orders” issued by Trump, the Washington Post reported last week.
“The words triggering NSF reviews provide a picture of the sievelike net being cast over the typically politically independent scientific enterprise, including words like ‘trauma,’ ‘barriers,’ ‘equity’ and “excluded.’”

In “1984,” Syme tells Winston that “the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.” Trump loyalists would argue that they’re doing the opposite, and making it easier to think freely, by reversing progressives’ language-policing. I’ll leave that debate to others. But I want to recognize that language — from the meaning of the word “censorship” to the name of the Gulf — is at the very heart of Trump’s scorched-earth approach to governance, and right now, he’s winning the war of words.

Trump bars AP reporter, but not photographer

Yesterday Trump triumphantly posted a Google Maps screenshot showing that Google has adopted his name change (for users in the U.S.). He evidently wants The AP to do the same.

The AP, because it represents so many news outlets, is typically always part of the White House press pool. But the wire service said it was told earlier in the day on Tuesday that — in Pace’s words — “if AP did not align its editorial standards” with Trump’s Gulf of America order, it would be blocked from attending Trump’s Q&A in the Oval Office. And that’s exactly what happened.

“The White House cannot dictate how news organizations report the news, nor should it penalize working journalists because it is unhappy with their editors’ decisions,” the White House Correspondents’ Association said, calling the action against the AP “unacceptable.”

But it happened a second time late in the evening when Trump welcomed Marc Fogel home from Russia in front of the press pool. Notably, on both occasions, the AP’s photographer was allowed in. Only the reporter was barred.

The AP’s stylebook guidance about the Gulf is transparent and nuanced. The news outlet isn’t ignoring Trump’s renaming, it is simply recognizing that “Trump’s order only carries authority within the United States;” thus its stories still say Gulf of Mexico but do acknowledge “the new name Trump has chosen.”

Maybe this will turn out to be an isolated incident. But it doesn’t feel that way to AP editors. As Jonah Goldberg wrote back in 2021, “if you control the language, you control the argument, which means you control how reality is perceived.”