President Donald Trump is considering changing the name of another body of water: the Atlantic Ocean. But this time, he says, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told him no.
“We took a serious look at the Atlantic Ocean and I called Google Maps, which was really great with the lake,” Trump said at a rally in Pendleton, South Carolina, on Wednesday.
“No, no, no. This time I’m not doing it,” Trump recalled telling Pichai. According to Trump, Pichai explained that oceans span multiple countries and urged him: “Please don’t ask us to do this.” »
“Should I leave out… I think we should keep the Atlantic Ocean, right? » Trump asked the crowd.
But Trump is not done with the oceans. He then renamed the Pacific the “American Ocean” and asked what Europe would think of it, even though no part of Europe borders the Pacific.
This wasn’t the first time Trump brought up the idea. At a rally in Dalton, Georgia, last Friday, Trump said he asked Google to rename the Atlantic or Pacific “Trump Ocean.”
“You know what they said? ‘We’ve had enough. Enough is enough. We’re not doing it anymore,'” Trump told the crowd.
He said he was joking. He then added that he sent Google “a little picture” titled “The Trump Ocean” and the company called back to say the oceans were different. “I said I was joking. That time I was,” Trump said.
Trump first discussed renaming the ocean in August, when he signed the order renaming Lake Ontario in the Oval Office.
Fortune asked Google to confirm Trump’s account of the conversation and whether he had received a formal request to rename the Atlantic Ocean. Fortune also asked how Google would handle a proposed name change for an ocean shared by several countries. Google did not respond Fortunerequest for comment.
Trump’s efforts to rename geographic markers began on his first day back in office. On January 20, 2025, he signed an executive order directing the federal government to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
On August 27, 2026, he signed Executive Order 14422, renaming Lake Ontario Lake America, even though the lake is shared with Canada.
Can Trump rename an entire ocean?
For federal use, the names of oceans and seas fall under the jurisdiction of the Committee on Foreign Names, part of the American Board on Geographic Names. This is according to a report released in September by the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research service of Congress.
Trump could order federal agencies to adopt a different name for the Atlantic or the Pacific. This would not make the change binding elsewhere.
Lake Ontario shows the limits. Trump’s order renamed it for U.S. federal use, but Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected the change, saying Canadians would continue to call it Lake Ontario “then, now and always.”
At the international level, a United Nations resolution on geographical names states that when countries sharing a characteristic cannot agree on a common name, each country’s name is accepted. The choice of one country does not take precedence over that of others. It would be much more difficult to rename an ocean bordered by dozens of countries than a gulf or a lake.
Google didn’t have to follow Trump’s lead. But it is.
Google was not legally required to adopt either name change. The CRS report notes that federal naming decisions are not binding on private companies such as Google Maps and Apple Maps.
However, Google Maps adopted the Gulf of America and Lake America for US users after updating the Federal Geographic Names Information System. Google said the changes followed its long-standing policy of reflecting official government sources and displaying different names for bodies of water in different countries.
For the Gulf, users in Mexico always see Gulf of Mexico, while users outside the United States and Mexico see both names. The Gulf decision had a cost: Mexico sued Google over the label.
For Lake Ontario, Canadian users continue to see the original name, and users outside the United States and Canada see both. Apple Maps made the same change for US users a few days later.
Business Insider reported that Google was being “criticized” over the lake’s name change, amid backlash from users and Canadian officials.
Meanwhile, rival MapQuest refused to adopt the new name, as it had done for the Gulf. Its app rose from 128th place on Apple’s US App Store on August 28 to first place overall on September 1. The app saw about 632,000 downloads in the United States after Trump’s August 27 order, according to Sensor Tower data reported by TechCrunch.
From the “Trump Strait” float for the Strait of Hormuz to the proposed “American Ocean” for the Pacific, Trump has no shortage of new names. But if his account of Pichai’s reluctance is accurate, an entire ocean might be a step too far for Google.
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