Summary
Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is pushing legislation to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, arguing the U.S. military and taxpayers secure the region, making it “our gulf.”
Greene shared the proposal text on social media, calling for federal agencies to adopt the name change.
She linked the renaming effort to combatting Mexican cartel activity in the Gulf.
Trump supported the name change in a 2024 executive order, but there has been no indication of international adoption, including by the UK.
The Dutch-from-Holland thing is basically a quirk of the historical relationship between England and the Netherlands. Originally the English referred to all continental Germanic people as Dutch (from Deutsch, of course). Then the Netherlanders started to become a distinct group quite separate from other Germans. However, England had way more contact with the Netherlanders, who were both geographically closer and also a huge naval presence in the seas around England, so the name stuck to them instead of the Germans
Engand had massive textile trade with Flanders, sending wool, undyed and finished cloth to traders there. Originally, the Flemish did almost all the weaving, but the English moved up the value chain over the centuries. Where I live near the southwestern coast of England, there’s an estuary town where the cloth merchants lived and kept their showrooms, with houses that look like they’d be more at home in Antwerp or Amsterdam. The presence of Flemish and Dutch merchants in our city are also the reason we have the oldest continuously operating synagogue in England, as well as an ancient Jewish graveyard (the nonconformists soon got a graveyard next to it, since they weren’t allowed to be buried within the city walls either). The Low Countries were less antisemitic than most places in northern Europe.
And the later merchants’ bloodless coup that installed King Billy (a Dutch speaker who couldn’t understand English) further cemented economic and elite ties, as well as persecuting the Irish even more murderously than Oliver Cromwell’s mob did.
Apart from Pas de Calais and Brittany, the low countries were also the nearest shipping destinations from England.