New in PJ Media:
We have the Gulf of America and Lake America now, and President Donald Trump isn’t finished. Late Wednesday morning, he wrote:
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! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP
MS NOW quickly took the bait, posting less than two hours later a huffy article trying to portray Trump’s trolling as a problem for Republicans: “Trump suggests renaming the Strait of Hormuz after himself, causing fresh trouble for the GOP.”
Yeah, no. Republicans aren’t going to turn away from Trump because he trolls Democrats; quite the contrary. TDS sufferers may froth at the mouth with rage at this new enormity from Orange Man Bad, but others will laugh it off.
That’s what Trump himself does, a fact that MS NOW, true to form, tried to spin as a negative as it went into annoying schoolmarm mode to explain why we should all be offended at the idea of a Trump Strait: “Right off the bat, it’s worth emphasizing that Trump’s repeated insistence that the United States now ‘controls’ the Strait of Hormuz is absurd.” There was a link on “is absurd” that went back to an earlier MS NOW article; in other words, they didn’t have any real evidence.
MS NOW was also incensed that Trump has said this before: “Let’s not forget that he made similar comments about renaming the Strait of Hormuz after himself in March, although at the time the president played it up for laughs. Six months later, there was no implied humor in his missive about the waterway, which he’s also begun referring to in recent weeks as a U.S. territory. (It’s not.)” What would we do without MS NOW to explain these things to us?
It was, of all people, disgraced National Security Adviser John Bolton who explained to the terminally humorless (that is, leftists) several weeks ago what Trump is doing here. “Trump is trolling people,” Bolton said. “In the first term, I was in his office once. He was dictating a tweet when he told the person typing it, ‘Capitalize all the letters in that last sentence’… And he said, ‘Because it drives them crazy.’”
Indeed. And Trump’s tendency to rename things drives leftists particularly crazy, which may be why he so delights in doing it: the left’s incandescent rage at Trump over the names of the (former!) Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario throws into sharp relief the hypocrisy of the people who demanded that everyone use the pronouns “she” and “her” for mentally ill men who insisted they were really women, and who renamed American military bases all over the country that had been named for Confederate generals.
There is more. Read the rest here.
somehistory says
Some individuals know just how to pull the strings….and Mr. Trump is one of those people…of others who may be *sensitive*.
The mulla ghouls of iran would salivate at the prospect of being able to change the names of places in the U.S. in worship of their false god and fake prophet, as well as some of their more notorious terrorists.
The strings of the left are being pulled and the pride of the ghouls is being threatened.
Taffy says
Globes are expensive! I’m not happy about making my previous globe obsolete every time Trump changes a geographic name.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Even John Bolton, who has his disagreements w/ Trump, knows that the latter is trolling people. He advises his pals on the Left about it, but they keep falling for it
That said, there is a foreign aspect to this trolling that can damage our interest: the Iranian people. While some of them may take that as a trolling, they are very sensitive about geopolitical naming. As it is, there has been a trend in the region by their Arab neighbors to rebrand the Persian Gulf as the Arabian Gulf. Maybe in opposition to the islamic republic, or maybe just out of colloquial convenience, many Americans in the diplomatic establishment simply call it the Gulf. That is one thing the Iranians don’t take very kindly to, since it was called the Persian Gulf long before the islamic republic – in fact when cartographers were first mapping out the area. As Armin Navabi points out, Iranians don’t call the Arabian Sea the Persian Sea, so why does the Persian Gulf have to be rebranded due to the misdeeds of the islamic republic?
Hormuz is even more unique in that the name isn’t muslim at all: it is named after Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian God. As a result, there is something uniquely non-Islamic about that name, apart from also being Persian. It’s therefore a bad idea to rename the Strait of Hormuz, even as a joke. If Trump wants to troll countries, why not troll Oman, and “threaten” to rename the Gulf of Oman to the Trump Gulf? Especially since he has openly threatened Oman as well, for having its own independent negotiations w/ the IRGC
Also, Trump did rename the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, so maybe some people are justified in getting nervous. Although these 2 are waters bordering America, while Hormuz is nowhere near America. and so the US calling it something else wouldn’t mean a thing. So while the trolling is great, I do think he should be mindful of what allies, such as the Iranian people struggling against their regime, would think of it