Donald Trump says he asked Google to rename the Atlantic the Trump Ocean, and the company’s CEO shut him down. Trump told the story at a rally in South Carolina on Wednesday, October 21, saying he personally called Sundar Pichai, who runs Google and its parent company, Alphabet.
According to Trump, Pichai’s answer was quick: “No, no, no. Please don’t ask us to do that.” Trump praised Pichai while telling the story, calling him brilliant and the man in charge of all of Google.
Trump then told the crowd he would “probably pass” on the idea. He asked the audience whether he should drop it, then answered his own question and said the Atlantic should keep its name. He did not let the idea go completely. Trump also floated renaming the Pacific “the American Ocean.”
There is no independent confirmation that the call took place. Google did not respond to requests for comment, and the account comes entirely from Trump.
Wednesday was not the first time Trump told the story. At a rally in Dalton, Georgia, on Friday, October 16, he described pitching the Trump Ocean to Google for either the Atlantic or the Pacific. In that version, he said he sent the company a picture of a map labeled “The Trump Ocean” and that unnamed Google representatives called back to turn him down. Trump said they told him, “Oceans are different. Oceans cover many, many countries.” He then claimed he had only been kidding, though he added that it was not the worst idea he had ever heard.
The two versions do not line up. In Georgia, the rejection came from company representatives Trump did not name. By South Carolina, it came from Pichai himself.
Trump took this to Google because Google Maps is where millions of people see place names every day, and the company has gone along with his renaming push before. In 2025, Trump signed an executive order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. In August of this year, he signed another order renaming Lake Ontario, which sits on the border with Canada, as Lake America. Google Maps adopted both names for users in the United States.
At the Wednesday rally, Trump framed an ocean as the next step, telling the crowd that after a lake and a gulf, he now wanted a river and an ocean. He has also floated renaming the Strait of Hormuz as the “Trump Strait.” That is the narrow waterway off the coast of Iran that much of the world’s oil passes through.
The Trump Ocean idea runs into a problem a gulf or a lake does not. The Atlantic touches dozens of countries across North America, South America, Europe and Africa, and no single government owns it or decides what it is called. A US president can order a new name for a gulf off the American coast or a lake on the American border on federal maps. An ocean shared by much of the world is another matter, and that is the point Trump says Google made to him.
For now, the Atlantic is still the Atlantic on Google Maps.
