One of the executive orders signed by Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2025 changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America.” That bit of foolishness at first seemed minor compared with some of the other destructive commandments this president has made.
But it has led to a lawsuit with profound implications for journalism.
After the president’s order, the Associated Press decided that it would keep referring to the Gulf of Mexico, and the White House promptly barred the A.P.’s reporters from the Oval Office. The news agency sued on the grounds that preventing it from covering the president’s actions violated the First Amendment, and a federal judge agreed, ordering that the A.P. be reinstated. But Trump appealed, and a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals voted two to one in June to grant a stay of the lower court’s ruling. A final ruling on the merits of the case is pending, and it may reach the Supreme Court.
George Lehner knows a lot about The Associated Press v. Budowich, the Gulf of America case. Lehner retired last year after 18 years as chief counsel for the White House Correspondents’ Association, and he lives in Orleans now. He’s celebrated in the Washington press corps as a champion of the First Amendment.
Lehner was there in November 2018 when Trump first tried to control the news by banning CNN’s Jim Acosta from the White House because he didn’t like the reporter’s questions. Acosta and CNN sued, and Lehner filed a brief arguing that allowing the president to choose who can come to White House events would eviscerate the press’s ability to do its work. Choosing to ask a tough question would become very risky.
“Forcing those who cover the president to make such an untenable choice is not something that the First Amendment can tolerate,” Lehner wrote. “Nor can the First Amendment … tolerate yielding to the president the power to effectively choose who does and who does not cover him.”
The court ruled against Trump back then — but times have changed, it seems.
“The White House is truly taking a much more aggressive, confrontational, strategic approach in what they’re trying to do this time,” Lehner told me on Saturday. “There is a concerted effort to undermine the media, to control the message in every possible way, and to undermine the public’s confidence in the media. It’s been happening for a while, and I think it’s working.”
Pushing the idea that reporters aren’t to be trusted is part of a long-term project designed to promote the “unitary executive theory,” that is, the belief — spreading now even among some federal judges — that democracy is outmoded and that government by an “enlightened despot” is more efficient.
What can a small newspaper do in times like these? “Local journalism gets people to be more engaged and pay attention to what is real,” said Lehner. At the Independent, we still call it the Gulf of Mexico.
