Trump likes renaming people, places and things. He's not the first to deploy that power (2025)

History, it's said, is written by the winners. President Donald Trump is working that lever of power — again.

This time, he insisted Washington's NFL team change its name from the Commanders back to the Redskins, a name considered offensive to Native Americans. An internet uproar ensued.

The president's favorite rebranding strategy has been well-used around the world and throughout history. Powers-that-be rename something — a body of water, a mountain in Alaska, ships, military installations, St. Petersburg, Istanbul, Mumbai, various places in Israel after 1948 — in line with their base's political and cultural views.

"A parent naming a child, a founder naming a company, a president naming a place… in each example, we can see the relationship of power," Shannon Murphy, who runs Nameistry, a naming agency that works with companies and entrepreneurs to develop brand identities, said in an email. "Naming gives you control."

Trump reignited a debate on football and American identity

It also had the added effect of distraction.

"My statement on the Washington Redskins has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way," he wrote on his social media platform, adding a threat to derail the team's deal for a new stadium if it resisted.

Trump's reelection itself can be seen as a response to the nation's reckoning with its racial history after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. That year, Americans elected Democratic President Joe Biden, who championed diversity. During his term, Washington's football team became first the Washington Football Team, then the Commanders, at a widely estimated cost in the tens of millions of dollars. In 2021, The Cleveland Indians became the Cleveland Guardians.

Is Trump's 'Redskins' push a distraction or a power play?

What's clear is that names carry great power where business, national identity, race, history and culture intersect.

Trump for decades branded everything from buildings named after himself to the gulf between Mexico, Cuba and the U.S. to his political opponents and people he simply doesn't like.TrumpdubbedFlorida's governor "Meatball Ron" DeSantis, who challenged him for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

Trump is not the first leader to use monikers and nicknames — branding, really — to try to define reality and the people who populate it. Naming was a key tool of colonization that modern-day countries still aretrying to dislodge. "Naming," one expert notes, "is never neutral."

"To name is to collapse infinite complexity into a manageable symbol, and in that compression, whole worlds are won or lost," linguist Norazha Paiman wrote last month on Medium.

"When the British renamed places throughout India or Africa, they weren't just updating maps," Paiman wrote. "They were restructuring the conceptual frameworks through which people could relate to their own territories."

This is not Trump's first rebranding push

Trump's order to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America is perhaps the best-known result of Executive Order 14172, titled "Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness."

The renaming sent mapmakers, search engines and others into a flurry over whether to change the name. It set off a legal dispute with The Associated Press over First Amendment freedoms. The news outlet's access to events in the Oval Office and Air Force One was cut back starting in February after AP said it would continue referring to the Gulf of Mexico, while noting Trump's wishes that it instead be renamed the Gulf of America.

It's unclear if Trump's name will stick universally — or go the way of "freedom fries," a brief attempt by some in the George W. Bush-era GOP to rebrand french fries after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

There's evidence that, at least for business in some places, the "Gulf of America" terminology has staying power. Chevron's earnings statements of late referred to the Gulf of America because "that's the position of the U.S. government now," CEO Mike Wirth said during a Jan. 31 call with investors.

Along the Gulf Coast in Republican Louisiana, leaders of the state's seafood industry call the body of water the Gulf of America, in part, because that slogan might help beat back the influx of foreign shrimp flooding U.S. markets, the Louisiana Illuminator news outlet reported.

Renaming is a bipartisan endeavor

The racial reckoning inspired by Floyd's killing rippled across the cultural landscape.

Quaker retired the Aunt Jemima brand after it was served up at U.S. breakfast tables for 131 years, saying it recognized that the character's origins were "based on a racial stereotype." Eskimo Pies became Edy's. The Grammy-winning country band Lady Antebellum changed its name to Lady A, saying they were regretful and embarrassed that their former moniker was associated with slavery.

Trump didn't start the fight over football. Democratic President Barack Obama told AP in 2013 that he would "think about changing" the name of the Washington Redskins if he owned the team.

Trump soon after posted to Twitter: "President should not be telling the Washington Redskins to change their name-our country has far bigger problems! FOCUS on them, not nonsense."

Fast-forward to July 20, 2025, when Trump posted that the Washington Commanders should change their name back to the Redskins.

"Times," the president wrote, "are different now."