Photo: Angelina Katsanis/POLITICO/AP Photo
Just when you thought jingoistic gestures couldn’t get much dumber than Trump’s designs on Canada and Greenland, Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert outdid her idol by suggesting that plans are underway to rename the District of Columbia “the District of America.”
Boebert was annoyed at Democrats for mocking Trump’s determination to rename the international body of water known as the “Gulf of Mexico” for 400 years as the Gulf of America, as the Hill reported:
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) urged lawmakers to stop making fun of President Trump’s decision to rename the Gulf of America, suggesting the nation’s capital could undergo the same change.
“I would caution my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to refrain from making jokes about the Gulf of America because next up may be the District of America that we are working on,” Boebert said during a Tuesday hearing for the House Natural Resources Committee.
Perhaps this was an idle threat. But then again, MAGA interest in remaking the nation’s capital is well established, as Trump himself noted during his recent address to Department of Justice employees:
We’re cleaning up this great capital, and we’re not going to have crime and we’re not going to stand for crime, and we’re going to take the graffiti down and we’re already taken to tents down there. … We’re working with the administration, and if the administration can’t do the job … we’re gonna have to take it back and run it through the federal government.
It’s not clear, however, exactly what problem Boebert and other Trump loyalists might have with the old name of the capital, first established as the “Territory of Columbia” by George Washington’s own handpicked commissioners. “Columbia” had already become a female symbol of the country, a predecessor to “Lady Liberty” and a ubiquitous presence in the patriotic literature of the 19th century.
Illustration: Frances Adams Halsted and V. Aderente/Corbis/Getty Images
The Columbia name was derived, of course, from Christopher Columbus, thought at the time to be the discoverer of America. Perhaps Boebert has “woke” concerns about Columbus’s murderous treatment of the Indigenous Americans he encountered? I don’t think so.
It is interesting, however, that Boebert’s big idea was articulated at a hearing over legislation sponsored by her frenemy Marjorie Taylor Greene to codify in law Trump’s Gulf of America executive order (originally introduced even before the 47th president took office). Greene once famously referred to her former friend and ideological colleague Boebert as “a little bitch” for horning in on her legislative plans. So perhaps the Coloradan is returning the favor by one-upping her on renaming places. Come to think of it, “Colorado” sounds as foreign as “Mexico.” Maybe Trumpiana or Magarado would work better? Don’t laugh …
