Cleveland City Council this week mocked Donald Trump’s penchant for rebranding the map, voting to pass a resolution renaming part of Lake Erie as the “Gulf of Cleveland.”
Ripples of laughter broke out across the chamber on Monday as council member Kris Harsh delivered a hilariously deadpan case for why it was time for Cleveland “to claim our birthright” with the move, that can’t actually be legally enforced.
Harsh recalled how Trump ― who he mockingly referred to as “our dear orange leader in D.C.” ― has ordered the Gulf of Mexico to now be called the Gulf of America, Lake Ontario to now be called Lake America and has also floated the idea of renaming the state of New Mexico as New America.
“And thanks to him, this is a man who clearly isn’t afraid to say what no one is thinking, I feel emboldened to take the extraordinary step of renaming Lake Erie as the Gulf of Cleveland, today,” said Harsh.
Watch from the 1:06:00 mark here:
Harsh, maintaining his deadpan delivery, argued that “there’s a very real person in Pennsylvania right now who wants to rename it the Lake of Pennsylvania” and warned that “we cannot as Ohioans let the Pennsylvanians get a jump on us. It’s our lake.”
He riffed on the linguistic history behind Lake Erie, adopted Trumpian rhetoric to mockingly call critics of his plan “commie pinko devil worshippers” and brushed aside the inconvenient geographical fact that Lake Erie is not actually a gulf.
“And I say, “Who cares?” Listen to me very carefully and jot this down. Words don’t matter,” he said, before holding up a map on which he’d scrawled “Gulf of Cleveland,” in an apparent parody of Trump’s own rebranding efforts.
“And I do expect Google and Apple to recognize our sovereignty and show it as the Gulf of Cleveland on all maps, specifically when that search is done from within the city of Cleveland,” he said, taking another swipe at the consequences of Trump’s renaming push.
Then came perhaps the least subtle part of the joke.
“Words don’t matter, but the whims of powerful white men like me do,” said Harsh, before predicting the rebrand would deliver a tourism boom.
“People like to vacation in gulfs. It’s a big tourist thing. If the mayor gets his way, we’ll have a golf course on the lake. Then you can golf in the gulf, potentially setting up a driving range to golf, literally into the gulf.”
Harsh wrapped up his tongue-in-cheek pitch by declaring: “So, it’s a wonderful day when the city of Cleveland can finally remind the whole world that we’re the only authorities on words and names and particularly on words that come from names.”