Trump pitches a rename for New Mexico. ‘Oh hell no,’ the state’s officials fire back
Top officials in New Mexico are blasting President Donald Trump’s pitch for renaming the 47th state “New America” after he floated the bizarre idea in a wave of social media posts over the weekend.
On Sunday, the president posted an AI-generated video to Truth Social of him slapping a label with “America” on it over New Mexico on a border sign and then dancing to the Village People’s YMCA.
Trump wrote that “many people” had “suggested changing the name of New Mexico, one of the great vote cheating states of all time, to NEW AMERICA.”
“So much more prestigious and beautiful for the people of that potentially incredible State,” he said.
The president followed up his post on Monday by posting a succession of what appeared to be AI-generated images showing different maps of the state in which the state’s name had been replaced with “New America.”
Though he has no authority to rename the state, the idea is reminiscent of his January 2025 executive order to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
The move drew a swift reaction from the state’s Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham. She responded in a post on X in which she said the state’s name was not “up for debate” and stressed that it predates the United States itself.
One of the state’s two Democratic senators, Ben Ray Lujan (no relation to the governor), responded with his own X post calling out the president directly.
“It’s New Mexico, always has been and always will be. Just like how you’ll always be a sinvergüenza and corrupt,” he said.
Another Democratic member of Congress from the state, Representative Melanie Stansbury, was even more succinct in her pushback to the president’s idea. “Oh hell no!” she posted on X.
“Our state’s name carries generations of history, culture, and family—and it belongs to us. We’re New Mexicans. Period,” she added.
The criticism directed at the president even took on a bipartisan tone after GOP gubernatorial nominee and ex-Rio Rancho, New Mexico mayor Gregg Hull told the Albequerque Journal that the state he wishes to lead “does not need a new name.”
“This state carries the history of Native nations and Spanish explorers who named this land nearly five hundred years ago, and generations of families who built New Mexico into what it is today. That identity is not up for negotiation,” he said.
Trump’s latest renaming suggestion comes a week after he signed an order to rename one of the five Great Lakes along the U.S.-Canada border from Lake Ontario to Lake America amid his ongoing trade war with Ottawa.
