For a President with a proclivity for renaming geographical entities, it should have come as no surprise over the weekend when the nation’s chief executive said he wanted New Mexico to have a new name.
On his Truth Social platform on Sunday, Trump ran a photo of a New Mexico map, with the word “Mexico” crossed out and replaced with the word “America.” The White House subsequently re-posted the image on its official X account.
Several hours later Trump posted a video showing him placing the word “America” over “Mexico” on a state “Welcome to New Mexico” road sign. He subsequently remarked: “Many people suggested changing the name of New Mexico, one of the great vote cheating states of all time, to New America.”
Trump added that the change would be “so much more prestigious and beautiful for the people of that potentially incredible State.”
Trump’s name-change proposal was met with immediate criticism, starting with New Mexico Democrat Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham who remarked: “New Mexico’s name isn’t up for debate—it’s been ours since before the United States existed.”
Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Hull released a statement in which he said, in part, “New Mexico does not need a name change.” Hull noted the Native American and Spanish history of the state, before adding, “That identity is not up for negotiation.”
In criticizing previous Trump renaming efforts, New Mexico Democrat Senator Martin Heinrich listed the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario, and the State of New Mexico as “three things I will always call by their actual names.”
In early 2025, the President signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Last week he did the same with Lake Ontario, declaring that it would now be called Lake America. With the latter order, Trump remarked that the U.S. has invested “nearly $4 billion in protecting the Great Lakes freshwater ecosystem in the last decade, while Canada has invested far less in similar initiatives over the same period.”
By law, the President lacks the authority to rename any state. Any such proposal would have to come from within the state itself, a prospect that in New Mexico seems remote given the that the state has a Democrat governor and Democrat majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.
Trump’s charge of vote cheating in New Mexico stems from the 2020 election when he lost the state to Democrat Joseph Biden by a 54.2% to 43.5% margin. The Trump campaign launched a federal lawsuit over the use of ballot drop boxes in the state before withdrawing the suit two months after the election.
September 8, 2026
By Garry Boulard
Image courtesy of University of New Mexico Digital Collection
