A warning from the Lion of Judah

Perhaps the most consequential act of the Trump presidency is now in court

The Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, in 1970. His words from nine decades ago ring true today. (Official portrait)

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During the summers of my childhood, my father’s frugality would smack up against his wanderlust. So our family’s summer vacations involved long road trips from our Midwestern home with a travel trailer in tow. I cherish memories of visits to national parks, but I recall that Pop always had more ambitious adventures in mind — especially after he learned that a caravan of Airstreamers had met in Ethiopia with Emperor Haile Selassie. Then, of course, he had to buy an Airstream.

Pop could hardly imagine it: a bunch of trailer-towing American tourists meeting with a guy whose titles included “Keeper of the Door” and “King of Kings” and my favorite, “Lion of the Tribe of Judah, His Imperial Majesty.” When Selassie took power in 1930, he claimed to be descended from the Queen of Sheba and, through her husband, from King Solomon. The Airstreamers in 1959 marveled as aides to the emperor showed up just after sunrise to walk the palace lions on sturdy chains through the Royal Race Track grounds.¹

That’s a realm of self-aggrandizement that even now might put a certain President of the United States in his place. But given Donald Trump’s claim that God saved him from assassination to lead America, it was hardly surprising this week when an official White House social media post featured an illustration of him wearing a crown with the New York skyline behind him, and the message “LONG LIVE THE KING!” Surely that was meant as a bitter joke — ha, ha — because Trump’s team loves to set off the anxiety of people who aren’t amused by his authoritarian inclinations. The Mahatma of Mar-a-Lago is no Lion of Judah, but he’d like to be.²

Yet bluster can get results, especially if it is met with only anemic pushback. This second Trump term is teaching us that a brash leader can shake even the pillar of our democracy, the Constitution. We’re waiting, impatiently, for the other two branches of government to exercise their oversight roles.

Congress and the courts certainly have cause to act: Under Section 3 of the Constitution’s second article, the president is required to assure that all laws are “faithfully executed” — a provision that Trump has repeatedly disregarded by freezing congressionally authorized spending, shutting down agencies established by law, firing government employees subject to civil service protection and attempting to revoke birthright citizenship, which the Constitution guarantees.

Even so, none of that may turn out to be as consequential as the genuine threat that has emerged from what was seen at first as a minor Oval Office tantrum by Trump. It involves one of those seemingly peripheral but typically Trumpian issues — in this case, the president’s announcement that the Gulf of Mexico should from now on be called the Gulf of America. Like Trump’s claim that Canada should be swallowed as the nation’s 51^st state and Greenland ought to sell itself to America — both seen at first as almost laughably outlandish — the follow-through after a seemingly frivolous action is revealing how an unconstrained ruler’s whims can have serious ramifications.

We ought to be worried. We need to respond.

It was about 400 years ago that Spanish explorers started using the term “Golfo de México” to refer to the water that stretches from Florida through Texas and down to Mexico. They called it that because it was the water passage to the large city to the south that was called México; only later did the country linking North America to Central America take on the name of the city and the gulf.³

Traditions don’t always dictate place names around the globe. The International Hydrographic Organization oversees mapping and charting of all the world’s waterways, and it names some of them.⁴ But nobody can tell people what to call something that is not their own property. So, for example, Americans call the river between Mexico and the U.S. the Rio Grande, while Mexicans say it’s Rio Bravo. And what we call the South China Sea is known in Vietnam as the East Sea and in the Philippines as the West Philippine Sea.

So when Trump signed an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico, he was engaging in a bit of overreach, because that water doesn’t belong to the country that gave him his current job. You know, Russian mapmakers might be ordered to call the moon Putin, but it’s a fair bet that nobody outside the Kremlin’s sphere of influence would pay any attention; journalists around the world wouldn’t suddenly begin reporting on the scheduled 2027 return of humans to the “Putin” surface in the first “Putin” mission since 1972. (Or maybe I missed it: Has Elon Musk cancelled NASA’s next moonshot?)

It's not that a President doesn’t have lawful privileges. At the same time as his Gulf of America proclamation, Trump also signed an order returning the name Mount McKinley to highest peak in North America, which has been called Denali for a decade (and for hundreds of years before the end of the 19^th century, when it was first named for the 25^th president). Although the idea of abandoning the name rooted in native American history is unpopular in Alaska, the president’s whim will likely stick. It is American land, so America gets to name it, the argument goes, and Trump will almost surely get his way.

But the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico isn’t that easy, as the pushback to Trump’s decree made clear. The president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, suggested that the southwestern United States — a part of Mexico until the Mexican-American war of 1848 — ought to be called América Mexicana. And the Associated Press, a global news organization that has been a standard of fair reporting since its founding during that war, announced that in its news coverage and its influential AP Stylebook, it wouldn’t follow Trump’s directive — since, after all, it’s an international waterway.

This bit of independent journalistic decision-making was displeasing to the president, who is clearly more comfortable with the bended knee of Fox News and other propaganda outlets, and who has famously called honest journalists “enemies of the people.” He responded by barring AP reporters and photographers from an Oval Office event, and then from more White House activities, and then from Air Force One and Mar-a-Lago. The exclusion of AP from those venues is now White House policy.⁵

To be clear: AP is not just any news organization. Its coverage is picked up by thousands of news outlets around the world, and its Stylebook is an influential standard for word usage, as well as such details as punctuation and capitalization. You might think that the President of the United States has more important stuff to do than act as an executive editor; after all, there are agencies to gut, allies to offend, impoverished and ailing millions to kill by withdrawing aid. But journalists should not doubt that Trump intends to be obeyed. Surveying the AP’s transgression, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Taylor Budowich, piously declared, “This decision is not just divisive, but it also exposes the Associated Press' commitment to misinformation.” He called the refusal to re-label the gulf “irresponsible and dishonest reporting.”

It is not that at all. In fact, the AP is laying out the principled position that independent news outlets in the United States can’t let a President — or anybody else in officialdom — dictate what words it can use. If the AP gives in on this, who’s to say what words Donald Trump might next decide he doesn’t want journalists to use?

Perhaps there will be penalties for news organizations that refer to “diversity,” a logical enough extension of Trump’s order aimed at obliterating diversity, equity and inclusion training at entities that receive federal dollars. Maybe the Federal Communications Commission will decide that covering opposition to Trump threatens a broadcast license. News organizations that continue to report that Russia launched the war in Ukraine ought to worry: Might they be barred from covering the Pentagon, since Trump’s absurd revision of recent history casts Ukraine as the aggressor?

If this strikes you as outrageous or alarmist, please remember what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, and consider, then, how the events of that day are now being recast by a president with no regard for truth: “Nothing done wrong at all,” he said lately, describing it as “a day of love.” The U.S. Department of Justice is now probing those who see it otherwise, including members of the congressional investigative committee.⁶

It’s a short step from that to imagine other officials mimicking the president, with decrees of acceptable and forbidden words arising in state capitols, in city halls and at village board meetings around the country. We cannot assume any longer that America is an exceptional country where all citizens are free to say and publish what we will. We were that; we are not now.

On Friday afternoon, the Associated Press filed a federal lawsuit, arguing that pushing it out of White House events was a violation of the First Amendment’s free press guarantee. “The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government,” the AP said in its lawsuit. The White House press secretary replied, “We’ll see them in court.” The case has been assigned to a federal judge who was appointed to the bench by Trump.⁷

My dad eventually got his Airstream — in fact, he owned three of them among the eight travel trailers and 72 automobiles he traded for in his lifetime — but he never managed to make an international caravan. Nor did he ever meet a national leader, let alone one claiming to be in the line of a biblical figure. But he wasn’t immune to political pressure; he once told me, in fact, of how affected he was by the McCarthy era, when a crusade launched by a right-wing politician put millions of people at risk of losing their friendships and livelihoods based upon their words and beliefs.

Pop was the minister of a small Midwestern church in those days. To avoid the threat of being perceived as unpatriotic, he explained, he began to write out the texts of his sermons rather than preaching from an outline, the better to defend against any claim that he had urged behavior offensive to official sensibilities.

It may strike us today as improbable that anything said in a pulpit in a small Indiana city would imperil somebody’s freedom. But that’s where Haile Selassie’s experience might have been revelatory then, as it is now.

In 1935, the troops of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in what was later understood to be a test of whether the new League of Nations could check the aggression of expansionist states. It could not: Using its superior forces and banned poison gas, Italy quickly annihilated the Ethiopian troops, forcing Selassie into years of exile. Several months later, in a speech to the embarrassed international assembly, Selassie said, “It is us today. It will be you tomorrow.” Indeed, Hitler invaded Poland three years later, launching World War II.⁸

It's not a silly fight, then, that pits the Trump White House against the Associated Press, and it’s not really about what to call the Gulf of Mexico. It’s about our freedom, which is surely at stake in a nation where truth-telling has suddenly become quite risky, and where our Constitution itself is hanging in the balance. If it is the AP today, it could be all of us tomorrow.

1. https://www.airstream.com/blog/wally-majesty-ethiopian-king/

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/us/politics/trump-king-image.html

3. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/us-politics/gulf-of-mexico-donald-trump-b1203521.html

4. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/can-trump-change-the-name-of-the-gulf-of-mexico-to-gulf-of-america

5. https://www.axios.com/2025/02/14/ap-trump-white-house-gulf-of-america

6. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-nothing-was-done-wrong-jan-6-republican-voter-confronts-rcna175755

7. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/business/media/ap-white-house-ban-lawsuit.html

8. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/lists/fascist-italy-invades-ethiopia

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WHAT’S YOUR VIEW?

This essay argues that Donald Trump’s effort to enforce his executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico is unconstitutional, and that it presents a threat to our freedom more broadly. Do you agree? What ideas do you have to add to the conversation? How should we respond to today’s challenges?

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MORE FROM THE UPSTATE AMERICAN

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-Rex Smith