Republican Representative aggressively advocates for renaming District of Columbia to align with MAGA ideology

Lauren Boebert proposed that Donald Trump might extend his ‘Gulf of America’ concept to his current place of residence by giving Washington D.C. the name ‘District of America.’

The move echoes a rebranding Trump made early in his second term when he chose to rename the Gulf of Mexico. 

This body of water had been known as the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ for about five hundred years until Trump changed it to ‘the Gulf of America’ through an executive order earlier this year.

Trump justified this decision by stating that he took this step ‘because [the Gulf] has long been an integral asset to our once flourishing Nation… and an indelible part of America.’

While many outlets refused to say the new name and have since faced criticism from the administration, the recent rescuing of the two astronauts in the body of water did see liberal media beginning to budge.

Boebert, a close Trump ally and firebrand Colorado Republican, was speaking to a House Natural Resources Committee hearing Tuesday to pass the Gulf of America Act in order to support Trump’s executive order renaming the body.

She said she was tired of Democrats disrespecting the renaming and warned them of what could come next. 

‘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 

DailyMail.com has reached out to the White House and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser for comment. 

The city is called the District of Columbia as a tribute to Christopher Columbus, as the country was often known as ‘Columbia,’ the feminine form of Columbus.  

Trump renaming America’s capital city would be the latest in a battle he’s been waging with Bowser, a Democrat in one of the nation’s most liberal leaning cities.

The president said in early March that he sent notification to Democrat D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser demanding she ‘clean up all of the unsightly homeless encampments’ throughout the city.

Bowser has set a conciliatory tone ever since Trump was elected again. 

She traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump, and said she looked forward to working with the new administration and emphasized the common-ground issues – such as their mutual desire to get federal workers back to their offices.

Workers in Washington on Monday began removing a ‘Black Lives Matter’ street mural installed during the height of 2020 racial justice protests, bowing to pressure from Trump.

Large, yellow lettering reading ‘Black Live Matter’ has been painted on a roadway near the White House since June 2020, when protests broke out across the nation following the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man.

City officials in the US capital have credited the art installation with calming tensions near the White House, where violent clashes between protesters and security personnel had occurred in the days prior.

Trump, who was president at the time of the unrest, returned to office in January seeking to overturn so-called diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices which spread widely throughout the public and private sectors following the George Floyd protests.

Congressional Republicans and Trump aides had eyed the mural as part of their move to force changes in the administration of Washington, an overwhelmingly Democratic city. 

When asked if it was in response to White House pressure, she said: ‘I’m not going to talk about specifics… but I think it’s safe to say that people don’t like it, didn’t like it.’ 

Trump, one month into his second term, has publicly returned to one of his longtime talking points: a federal takeover of the District of Columbia.

Activist Republicans in Congress have long used the House Oversight Committee as a forum to employ their power over the local government. 

During the crime spike in 2023, Bowser and members of the D.C. Council were regularly summoned for inquiries before the committee. 

That year, Congress also, for the first time in decades, fully overturned a D.C. law when it repealed a rewrite of the D.C. criminal code. 

But that required Congressional Democrats to join in, and then-President Biden to sign off on it.

Members of Congress have also repeatedly used budget riders to alter D.C. laws in minor ways, targeting everything from marijuana legalization to the city’s use of traffic cameras.

As an indication of just how personal and petty this dynamic has become, the bill previously introduced in Congress proposing to repeal D.C. home rule was titled to produce an antagonistic acronym. 

It’s called the Bringing Oversight to Washington and Safety to Every Resident Act or the BOWSER Act.

However, Bowser’s charm offensive appears to have been working, as Trump praised her actions since he took office in his speech at the Department of Justice.

‘So far, they’ve been doing very well. The mayor has been doing a good job,’ he said.

However, he warned: ‘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.’  

‘We’re cleaning up our city. 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,’ he added.

If he renamed the District of Columbia, he would likely have to dig his heels in for another battle with the media, as well.