Victor Davis Hanson: The Left Renamed Everything. Now Trump Does It, and They're Furious.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to the Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take.

**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:08)
Donald Trump has just renamed Lake Ontario one of the five Great Lakes. He said as far as America is concerned, it's now Lake America. People got very, very angry about that and said it was sort of to pay back Canada because it walked out on a trade agreement, and this is unprecedented, it's unheard of, and he would do that, it's not unheard of.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. We're in another psychodrama, melodrama controversy and that is that Donald Trump has just renamed Lake Ontario one of the five Great Lakes, 55 percent of which is in Canada, 45 percent in the United States. He said as far as America is concerned, it's now Lake America. People got very, very angry about that and said it was sort of to pay back Canada because it walked out on a trade agreement. And this is unprecedented, it's unheard of that he would do that. It's not unheard of. Going back to the Roman age, every time an unpopular emperor died or was executed, or was exiled, the Roman puppet Senate issued a Dom Natio Memoriae. That means we're gonna damn him to memory. And what that meant was all of his images and his name placards all over the empire, 70 million people, a million square miles were erased. They were very economical and practical, the Romans. They didn't destroy this statue because most people's bodies were portrayed in sculpture the same. They just wiped out the face and redid it or cut the head off and put a new emperor's head. But the point was the same. And it happens all over the world today. As you, we call it the Persian Gulf. If you talk to the Arabs on the other side of the Gulf, they call it the Arab Gulf. We call it the Rio Grande. I think the Mexicans often call it the Rio Bravos. So each country has a different name. But getting back to the issue, did Donald Trump start this? No, he's only reacting to a long tradition and a tradition, I might add, that's been very popular the last 15 years. It was Barack Obama who changed Mount McKinley that had been pretty much there for over 100 years. And he called it Mount Denali, the indigenous name. And the state of Alaska had too. Trump changed that back.
I work at Stanford University. One day I came to the Hoover Tower and I looked around and I thought something was strange about the street sign. I couldn't quite figure out. It said Stanford Mall, Stanford Plaza, named after Jane Stanford Plaza. I thought it was Sarah Mall the last time, named after Junipio Sarah. It was, but Stanford had voted to take off the word Sarah because supposedly, this 18th century Catholic priest who helped build California, in some sense as we know it, as far as when it was under Spanish control, he was integral in offering agriculture, introducing new crops, creating the El Camino Real basically. And all of a sudden, he was considered anti-indigenous and mean to indigenous people. Of course, it was never symmetrical. We have places in California named Montezuma, athletic teams called the Aztecs. This is a culture that on some years, what, sacrificed over 50,000 people on the Great Pyramid at Tenochtitlan, in modern Mexico City. You go to UC Berkeley for years, people talked about Bolt Hall. Suddenly, Mr. Bolt was considered politically incorrect. He was off. The Earl Warren Legal Institute, named after a Supreme Court justice and former governor of California, it just became the legal institution. Why? Because Earl Warren signed the deportation of Japanese Americans. So the left changes names all the time. And yet they get very, very angry when Donald Trump names the Gulf of America. Which by the way, if you look at the coastline of the Gulf of America and compare it with the coastline of Mexico that borders the Gulf and the southern part, it's about equal. In fact, there may be more coastline that are American, 1,750 miles versus 1,700 miles, 20, 720 miles on the Mexican side. Mexico calls it the Gulf of Mexico. Fine, we have no problem. We call it the Gulf of America. Fine, we have no problem.
If you're going to object that Donald Trump names things, then it's incumbent upon you to say that other presidents don't do it. It is true that his name is on a lot of trying, the co-name of the Kennedy Center now is Donald Trump.
But the only difference between Biden and Obama and Trump is that they had surrogates, committees that rename things. And a lot of them were liberally appointed, and that's fine. But if you look at the number of schools, the number of streets, the number of geographical places that were named after Obama versus Trump, it's not even close. So it's indicative of another artifact, though, and that is, we apply a standard to this administration that we never applied to the others, or we never objected to precedents that they established that they thought were fine, but now the result is not what they want, and they want to claim that there was no precedent. Think, for example, about the politicalization of the attorney general. They said, Todd Blanch is too close to Trump. He was his personal lawyer. We forget that Obama's attorney general was his best friend, Eric Holder, who said, I am, what did he say? I am Obama's wingman, wingman as if he was on a military flight mission, protecting the president, not disinterestedly applying justice. Same thing with JFK, because he appointed Robert Kennedy. Nobody really objected too loudly. They didn't stop that appointment.