In the blizzard of paperwork that has characterised Donald Trump’s first weeks back in the White House, we may have missed the finer detail of Executive Order 14172, which was signed by the new President on the day of his inauguration in January.

It was entitled “Restoring Names That Honour American Greatness”. Its directives did not include renaming Snickers as Marathon bars, or Meta to Facebook, or even Cif back to Jif, but rather to redraw the map of the region and to “take all appropriate actions to rename as the ‘Gulf of America’… the area formerly named as the Gulf of Mexico.”

Why should we care? Bound in typically grandiose Trumpian rhetoric – “As my Administration restores American pride in the history of American greatness,” he said, “it is fitting and appropriate for our great Nation to come together and commemorate this momentous occasion and the renaming of the Gulf of America” – this could be dismissed as a piece of grandstanding that doesn’t........

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