Amplifying a Satirical Hoax That Claimed He Had Signed Such an Order, Trump Spent Labor Day Posting Seven Times in an Hour to Rename the State of New Mexico "New America" — Crossing "Mexico" Off the Map of a Majority-Hispanic State Whose Name Predates the United States, Smearing It as "One of the Great Vote Cheating States of All Time," and Proposing Something No President Has Any Power to Do

It is worth pausing on how the President of the United States spent a national holiday. Not on the war his generals call unwinnable, not on the gas prices at record highs, but on a satirical internet hoax about renaming a state — which he liked so much he decided to make it his own, seven times in an hour. This is the presidency as a phone in a man's hand at 2 a.m., and the map of the country as something to deface for a reaction.

What he posted

Across the Labor Day weekend, Trump pushed the idea that New Mexico should be renamed "New America." He posted a map of the state with "Mexico" crossed out in red and "America" written beneath — an image the White House reshared on X. He posted an AI-generated video of himself slapping "America" over a "Welcome to New Mexico" road sign. And he wrote, on Truth Social:

"Many people suggested changing the name of New Mexico, one of the great vote cheating states of all time, to NEW AMERICA. So much more prestigious and beautiful for the people of that potentially incredible State."

On Labor Day itself he posted about it seven times in a single hour.

It started as a joke — on him

The origin is its own small humiliation. The whole thing traces to a satirical social-media account ("Casper Planet," which bills its output as "Snews that doesn't matter") that falsely claimed Trump had signed an executive order renaming the state — a hoax the fact-checking site Snopes debunked. Rather than correct it, Trump adopted the fake as a real proposal. A president amplifying a parody of himself until it becomes administration messaging is not a normal information diet; it is a man who cannot tell, or does not care about, the difference between a joke about power and its use.

Two things that are simply true

Strip away the noise and two facts anchor this:

• He cannot do it. A president has no authority to rename a state. That would require the state itself and an act of Congress. Like his executive order "renaming" the shared Lake Ontario — which changed only a U.S. database, not the lake — this is symbolic conquest with no power behind it. It is posting, not policy, and it will change nothing but the timeline
• "New Mexico" was never named for the country. The name predates the United States, drawn from the historical region of Nuevo México, and the state today is majority-Hispanic — among the most Hispanic in the nation. Crossing out "Mexico" and stamping "America" over it is therefore not a neutral rebrand. It is a nativist gesture aimed squarely at a Hispanic-majority state, erasing the "Mexico" in its name as though it were something foreign to be corrected

The smear inside the stunt

Folded into the same post was a defamation: New Mexico, Trump wrote, is "one of the great vote cheating states of all time." There is no evidence for this; New Mexico is simply a state that votes Democratic. But the line is not idle. It slots into the broader, documented campaign this archive has tracked — the mail-ballot order, the voter database, the "fraud" pretext — in which Trump pre-emptively brands states that vote against him as corrupt. The renaming jibe and the fraud smear are the same move in two registers: delegitimize a place, whether by mocking its name or by accusing its voters of cheating.

The response

New Mexico's leaders were not amused. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham answered that the state's name "isn't up for debate — it's been ours since before the United States existed," and named the stunt for what it was: an attempt to "distract Americans from his disastrous war in Iran" while "the price of gas — and everything else — keeps rising." Other state leaders were blunter — "Oh hell no" — and the posts drew a torrent of online mockery.

Why it belongs here

On its face this is trivial, and that is exactly why it belongs on the record: it shows what commands the president's attention when real crises do not. It is the same reflex documented across this archive — the Gulf of "America," "Lake America," an airport restyled "DJT," a memorial he demanded be lettered with his name — the treatment of the shared map as personal branding surface, reaching for symbolic dominance because the substantive kind keeps eluding him. But this instance adds two uglier notes: it targets a Hispanic-majority state by erasing "Mexico" from its name, and it defames that state's voters as cheats. A serious government, on a day the country pauses to honor its workers, would have something to say about the workers. This one had seven posts about renaming their state, born from a joke it mistook for a plan.