'TRUMP STRAIT': U.S. president floats renaming Strait of Hormuz
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Donald Trump appears to be interested in renaming a third body of water.
The U.S. president continued his war of words with Iran on Wednesday morning by asking on social media if the Strait of Hormuz should be renamed after himself despite the waterway being thousands of kilometres away.
“Now that we have it under U.S.A. control, should we change the name Hormuz Strait to TRUMP STRAIT??? Like America itself, it would be ‘hotter’ than ever before,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account .
Who has control?
The Trump administration has repeatedly asserted that the U.S. has control over the strait since launching the war, while Iranian officials have denied those claims.
It comes a week after Trump issued an executive order renaming Lake Ontario to “ Lake America ” in his ongoing trade war with Canada.
On the first day of his second term in office in January 2025, Trump also changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” despite Mexico and other countries not recognizing the American revision to the large body of water.
Trump’s executive orders changing the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, which were named centuries ago, are only enforceable at the federal level for official government materials and documents.
However, Google and Apple decided to make the switch to both bodies of water for U.S. residents of their digital maps. Meanwhile, MapQuest resisted the update and saw a large increase in app downloads in the past week from Canadian and American users.
Strait caught up in war
The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow channel between Iran and Oman that connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, has been caught up in Trump’s war with Iranian leadership.
The strait handled about one-fifth of oil and gas shipments before military strikes due to the war launched by the U.S. and Israel in late February.
According to the World Trade Organization , which tracks outbound shipments of key commodities such as crude oil and natural gas, traffic has dropped significantly over the last six months.
Before the war, about 20 million barrels of crude oil passed through the strait.
However, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNBC on Wednesday that more than 17 million barrels of oil moved through the strait on Monday, the most since the war began.
The Trump administration’s numbers also include oil from pipelines constructed in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates to bypass the contested strait.