President Donald Trump has a suggestion for New Mexico: call it “New America.” The White House pushed the idea out on September 6, 2026, resharing a map the president had posted to his Truth Social account — the word “Mexico” crossed off the state and “America” inked in over it. Democrats across New Mexico — along with the Republican running to lead the state — have rejected it.
The notion did not originate with him. A fabricated executive order announcing that Trump had already renamed the state circulated on an X account on September 1, and the fact-checking site Snopes debunked it. Five days later, the president took up the idea himself, in earnest.
“Many people suggested changing the name of New Mexico, one of the great vote cheating states of all time, to NEW AMERICA,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. “So much more prestigious and beautiful for the people of that potentially incredible State. Wow, I Love It!!!”
On the map he posted, the Southwestern state appears with “Mexico” slashed through in bright red and “America” written over the top of it. The image later turned up on the White House’s verified X account. He came back to the theme on Labor Day, Monday, September 7, with at least seven more posts, among them an artificial intelligence video of himself slapping “America” over a road sign. Neither the president nor the White House offered any explanation, and neither clarified whether an actual policy proposal lay behind the idea.
New Mexico Officials Push Back
Flatly rejecting it was Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat who won re-election in 2022 and has held the office since January 1, 2019.
New Mexico’s name “isn’t up for debate — it’s been ours since before the United States existed,” she told Fox News Digital. “What is up for debate? Who’s showing up for working families.” Free childcare and college are being provided by the state under Democratic leadership, she said, which is also protecting access to health care and investing in housing. “While the White House wastes time coloring on maps, Nuevo México is busy doing the work.” In a social media post on September 6, the governor also said: “While the President tries to distract Americans from his disastrous war in Iran, gas prices keep soaring. Americans are also spending more at the grocery store, losing access to health care and wondering if they’ll ever be able to afford a home.”
Sen. Martin Heinrich, the state’s senior senator, went after the president’s wider renaming campaign. “Three things I will always call by their actual names,” he wrote. “The Gulf of Mexico. Lake Ontario. New Mexico.”
Sen. Ben Ray Luján showed less restraint. “It’s New Mexico, always has been and always will be,” he wrote of the president. “Just like how you’ll always be a sinvergüenza and corrupt” — the Spanish word for a scoundrel, someone without shame. On X, Rep. Melanie Stansbury was blunter still: “Oh hell no. Our state’s name carries generations of history, culture, and family — and it belongs to us. We’re New Mexicans. Period.” Rep. Gabe Vasquez, who represents the state’s southern district, wrote: “You don’t get to erase New Mexico. Not our name. Not our history. Not our culture.” Attorney General Raúl Torrez needed only one word the following day: “Pendejo.”
Democrats have cast the whole episode as a bid by the president to pull attention away from his war in Iran and from rising prices. His overall approval rating stands at 36 percent, according to NBC polling, with voters disapproving of his handling of tariffs, gas prices, the Iran war and inflation.
A Republican Nominee Breaks With Trump
The objections crossed party lines. A statement denouncing the suggestion came from Gregg Hull, the Republican nominee running to replace Lujan Grisham, who is term-limited. “New Mexico does not need a new name,” Hull said. “This state carries the history of Native nations and Spanish explorers who named this land nearly five hundred years ago, and generations of families who built New Mexico into what it is today. That identity is not up for negotiation.”
Deb Haaland, the Democratic nominee and a former U.S. interior secretary, rejected the idea as well; the department she once ran houses the board responsible for federal place names. “You can’t be serious,” she wrote. “New Mexico is not for renaming. Not up for sale. My promise: I’ll always stand up for what makes New Mexico, New Mexico.” The two nominees, Hull and Haaland, will face each other on November 3.
From the Gulf to the Great Lakes
Trump had signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” for federal use on Thursday, August 27, and the New Mexico post followed 10 days later. Numbered 14422, the order gives the interior secretary, in coordination with the Board on Geographic Names, 30 days to make the change — a deadline that falls on September 26 — and calls for every reference to Lake Ontario to be stripped out of the Geographic Names Information System. Carrying it out was a task the president said he had assigned to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
Agencies and mapmakers finished much of that work within days. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency made the change in the U.S. Geographic Names Server on August 29; Google Maps followed the same day, and Apple Maps came along on September 2 — in each case for users inside the United States. Opposition reached 63 percent in a Reuters/Ipsos poll of 1,023 adults taken August 28 to 30, which carried a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. Republicans opposed the order in greater numbers than they supported it, 43 percent to 33 percent.
The Associated Press announced on Wednesday, September 9, that the name Lake Ontario would remain in its usage, “including the name Trump has chosen when relevant.” Spokesman Patrick Maks said the agency “must ensure that place names and geography are recognizable to broad audiences.” The AP has handled the Gulf of Mexico the same way; Trump renamed it the Gulf of America hours after he returned to office in January 2025. Denali is the exception, since the mountain lies entirely inside the United States, and the wire service now calls it Mount McKinley. As of September 11, the administration’s renaming efforts also included the addition of Trump’s name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., alongside the Gulf of America and Lake America changes. The Strait of Hormuz was another target Trump floated renaming after himself, days before the New Mexico posts.
Why a State Is Different
Executive action can rename lakes, gulfs and other geographic features, but the change binds only the federal government: businesses, private organizations and state agencies are free to ignore it. A state is another matter entirely. The federal government has no constitutional authority to rename one — neither the president nor Congress holds that legal power. New Mexico’s name sits in the first line of Article I of its constitution — “The name of this state is New Mexico” — so a change would require a state constitutional amendment. Such an amendment must clear a majority of all elected members of both chambers of the Legislature before it goes to voters at a regular or qualifying special election. Only after a majority of citizens approved the measure would federal recognition follow, with the federal government simply updating its official registries, maps and agencies to recognize the state’s new decision. Congress has no role in any of it; federal law requires congressional consent only to create a state, split one or merge two. The president has not announced a formal push to change the name, and neither has his White House.
Cost is another obstacle. Renaming a state would run into millions of dollars, with the burden shared across multiple parties, according to an assessment published September 11 that called the legal and financial implications so complicated that the move is unlikely.
The name is far older than the state. Spanish expeditions were using “Nuevo México” for the territory by the 1560s, and in 1581 the Chamuscado and Rodríguez expedition gave the region its formal christening as San Felipe del Nuevo México. Explorers who anticipated comparable wealth and never found it had borrowed a reference to the Aztec heartland far to the south. That label outlasted the territory’s 1848 absorption into the United States, and statehood came on January 6, 1912, when President William Howard Taft signed Proclamation 1175.
Other names came close. Congress and territorial boosters floated Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, Salado and Sierra between 1850 and statehood. Montezuma was the name proposed in legislation introduced in 1888, while Bernard S. Rodey — one of the territory’s last delegates to the House — pushed for Acoma. The nearest miss came in 1906: Congress passed and President Theodore Roosevelt signed a bill admitting New Mexico and Arizona as a single state under the name Arizona, and Voters in the Arizona Territory rejected it.
The state historian, Rob Martinez, had the briefest answer of all. “New Mexico is a beautiful name, it’s historic, it sounds beautiful,” he told Reuters, “and New America does not.”
