The Gulf of America?
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What was the shocking moment in the Oval Office meeting?
What was your most shocking moment from the Oval Office meeting between Trump and Zelensky on Friday? I think mine might have been when some reporter asked the Ukrainian president why he wasn't wearing a suit. Do you own a suit? Yes. That's Brian Glenn from Real America's Voice, a right-wing, conspiracy-loving cable news channel that only recently got access to the White House when the new administration started handpicking who gets to hang out with the president. Real America's Voice is in. The Associated Press is out. You remember the AP, founded in 1846, 59 Pulitzers, king of style. They're currently suing the Trump administration over being banned from the Oval Office. And why were they banned? because they won't call it the Gulf of America.
We are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
How the president renamed the Gulf coming up on Today Explained. Support for the show comes from yonder. There's a certain time and place for you to be checking your phone, and the classroom probably isn't one of them. Shouldn't school classrooms have, at the very least, the level of focus a stand-up comedian would demand of... Their audience, Yonder, says they are committed to fostering phone-free schools. Learn more at overyonder.com. That's O-V-E-R-Y-O-N-D-R dot com. Overyonder.com without the E in Yonder. In every company, there's a whole system of decision makers, challenges, and strategies shaping the future of business at every level. That's why we're running a special three-part Decoder Thursday series, looking at how some of the biggest companies in the world are adapting, innovating, and rethinking their playbooks.
We're asking enterprise leaders about some of the toughest questions they're facing today, revealing the tensions, risks, and breakthroughs happening behind closed doors. Check out Decoder, wherever you get your podcasts. This special series from The Verge is presented by Adobe Express. Today, Explained here with Matt Visor, White House bureau chief for The Washington Post. Matt, it was on day one of President Donald Trump's second term where he mentioned the Gulf of America at his inauguration. Where did this idea come from? He wasn't running on the Gulf of America platform per se, was he? No, and there's a couple of different aspects of this. First is sort of the origin of this idea generally, which doesn't necessarily come from Trump. And then secondly is a little bit of indication of how it may have gotten onto his radar. The origins generally date back to at least 2010 as somewhat of a joke.
Stephen Colbert on his show on Comedy Central had referenced raising money for the BP oil spill at the time off the Gulf Coast in the Gulf of Mexico. This is one time when you want to hear that a charity is skimming from the top. And he named the fund that he was raising money for the Colbert Nation Gulf of America Fund. I don't think we can call it the Gulf of Mexico anymore. We broke it. We bought it.
How did the Gulf of America idea originate?
It was a joke. He raised about $100,000 to help those who had been impacted by the oil spill. And actually, the way that he raised money was from the Microsoft search engine called Bing. Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing. So he said Bing as many times as he could, and they would donate money for every time he said Bing. What a shame we didn't have one more Bing. So that was kind of the joke, the ruse, the total satire. Two years later, a Mississippi lawmaker also does it as a little bit of a kind of a trolling of his Republican colleagues at the time, making fun of them for being afraid of Hispanics and not calling it the Gulf of Mexico. So he kind of did it as a joke to rename the Gulf off of Mississippi as the Gulf of America.
So let's just get rid of the Mexico thing and let's have the Gulf of America. And we'll be very unique in this country and we'll be on an island unto ourself. Everybody else can have the Gulf of Mexico, but we'll have the Gulf of America. Again, joking. More recently, what we've been able to trace a little bit is conservative influencers started to refer to it as the Gulf of America. The one that I traced it to is a guy, Kevin Posobiec. Close listeners and followers may know his brother, Jack Posobiec, who's sort of a conspiracy theorist, well-known in the right-wing ecosphere.
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