Anti-Trump Journalists’ Nightmare Comes to Life: AP Style Guide Acknowledges Mt. McKinley, Gulf of America

MAGA is almost a decade old at this point. MAHA, thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other crunchy conservatives who have gotten behind President Donald Trump, has gained significant traction over the past few months.

Now, it’s time for MAJA: Make American Journalists Anxious.

OK, so it doesn’t have the same ring to it, but the sentiment behind it is good. And I’m not talking about canceling them or abrogating their free speech rights, mind you. I’m just saying that if a woke journalist has to take an extra Xanax or two a week because of their trauma over Donald Trump’s sociopolitical winning streak, I’ll lose far less sleep than they do.

As if the election night breakdowns and the pre-inauguration hyperventilation wasn’t fun enough, the discomfiture was ratcheted up a bit on Thursday when The Associated Press Style Guide — the style bible for most journos working in the United States — capitulated partway to the newly inaugurated president on his designation of two major geographical features.

In case you missed it, two of the executive orders signed by Trump on his first day in office changed the names of the Gulf of Mexico and Mt. Denali.

As CBS News noted, the Gulf of Mexico will heretofore be referred to as the Gulf of America, and Denali in Alaska will revert to the name Mt. McKinley — the name of the highest mountain in North America until 2015, when Barack Obama’s Department of the Interior started officially referring to the peak by the indigenous name for it.

“The area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America,” Trump said in his executive order. “The Gulf will continue to play a pivotal role in shaping America’s future and the global economy, and in recognition of this flourishing economic resource and its critical importance to our Nation’s economy and its people, I am directing that it officially be renamed the Gulf of America.”

As for the mountain formerly known as Denali: “In 1917, the country officially honored President McKinley through the naming of North America’s highest peak.  Yet after nearly a century, President Obama’s administration, in 2015, stripped the McKinley name from federal nomenclature, an affront to President McKinley’s life, his achievements, and his sacrifice,” the executive order read.

“This order honors President McKinley for giving his life for our great Nation and dutifully recognizes his historic legacy of protecting America’s interests and generating enormous wealth for all Americans.”

Naturally, you’d expect pushback from the media — particularly the AP, and especially since the executive order was titled “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness.”

However, the guidance from the AP on style in the wake of the executive order was — dare I say it? — relatively fair.

While noting that “[t]he Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years,” the wire service said it would “refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.”

“There are other examples where the AP refers to a geographical place by more than one name,” the guidance read.

“For example, the Gulf of California is sometimes referred to as the Sea of Cortez. The U.S. government has designated that body of water as the Gulf of California, while Mexico recognizes it as the Sea of Cortez.”

There were more MAJA vibes when it came to Denali/Mt. McKinley, which the wire service was far less equivocal about.

“President Trump also signed an executive order to revert the name of North America’s tallest peak, Denali in Alaska, to Mount McKinley. Former President Barack Obama changed the official name to Denali in 2015 to reflect the traditions of Alaska Natives as well as the preference of many Alaska residents. Trump said in his executive order that he wanted to ‘restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley,’” the guidance read.

And then the kicker: “The Associated Press will use the official name change to Mount McKinley. The area lies solely in the United States and as president, Trump has the authority to change federal geographical names within the country.”

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that every journalist who uses AP style has to follow suit, although many will be forced to use it. For instance, not to bore you with our internal protocols, but while The Western Journal uses AP style as a general guide, there are a small number of exceptions, both purely stylistic (we allow the use of the Oxford comma, a grammatical device the organization loathes so deeply you wonder if an Oxford comma shot some poor AP editor’s dog) and for social reasons (we use a person’s birth pronouns, not the ones they’ve chosen for themselves).

That being said, if the AP isn’t willing to take a hard stand on the use of the Gulf of America or Mt. McKinley to refer to those geographical features, it’s another sign that the journalistic establishment that spent years as a de facto arm of the Democratic Party and progressive causes has finally realized this has got them nowhere in terms of credibility or cultural cachet.

To which all I can say is: MAJA! You’ve certainly earned it, establishment media bumblers.

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