The race to see who can demonstrate the most cartoonish level of Donald Trump cult worship is unending. It’s only been a few months since House Republicans tried to rename Dulles Airport after Trump, but that seems positively picayune when compared to the bill Rep. Greg Steube of Florida intends to introduce on Friday.
Steube wants to rename the ocean after Trump. Not just one ocean, but the entire shoreline wrapping around the U.S. and covering over 4 million square miles.
His goal is for everyone everywhere—from Maine to Florida, along the Gulf Coast, up the Western Seaboard, all around Alaska, off the islands of Hawaii, and even in Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa—to be surrounded by the Sea of Trump. All to celebrate a guy who is terrified of fish.
The Exclusive Economic Zone is a strip of ocean up to 200 miles wide that extends out from all U.S. territories. It’s supposed to be a region where the U.S. holds special privileges on everything from fish and minerals to oil found deep underground. The zone was largely created by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 and was last reauthorized in 2007.
As its history might suggest, the Exclusive Economic Zone has nothing to do with Trump.
Even so, Steube is proposing a bill that aims to rename the entire 4,383,000 square miles the “Donald John Trump Exclusive Economic Zone of the United States.” The bill insists that this name be used on “any applicable laws, maps, documents, and other records.”
It’s not quite stamping every map with Trumplantic, Trumpacific, and Gulf of Trump … but it’s every bit as ridiculous.
Like other Republican efforts to show their loyalty to Trump, this proves that there really is no limit. Now that Steube has raised the ante, stand by for the Trumpissippi River, the great state of Trumpessee, in the United States of Trump, on planet Trump, in the Trumpar System, in the outer arm of the Trumpy Way galaxy of the Trumpiverse.
But it does have its upsides. Think how much easier geography will be when all of the answers are the same. And just wait until they get started on the dictionary.
It’s almost as if Republicans don’t remember that the actual Donald Trump is that guy from a second-rate reality show who served a single term in office during which his sole accomplishment was cutting taxes for billionaires. Or that while he was in the White House, Trump drove the nation into a recession, hit the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, lost millions of jobs, bungled a pandemic that killed over a million Americans, and tried to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.
And that’s leaving out the sexual assault, tax fraud, charity fraud, “university” fraud, money laundering, and discrimination. The only reason Trump hasn’t been in jail for decades is because he was born rich and uses his money to delay justice.
But maybe we really should name something in the ocean after Trump.
… the area is filled with something besides plankton: trash, millions of pounds of it, most of it plastic. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Pacific trash vortex, is the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the ocean.
The Great Donald J. Trump Garbage Patch. It has a nice ring to it. Someone draft a bill.
