Yours truly back in February 2025:

The motivation behind the name change is simple as well. Trump
didn’t change the US’s officially recognized name of, say, the
Atlantic Ocean or the continent of Africa. He just as easily
could, but he won’t.

I’m starting to worry how well that’s going to hold up.

And it’s not like “Gulf of Mexico” was on a list of “debatable or
controversial names” until he created this controversy out of thin
air. It’s just the one name on the globe that a president of the
United States can change to stick it to Mexico, a country Donald
Trump has objectively racist feelings toward. Trump
never campaigned on building a wall at our northern border with
Canada, nor has he (yet?) attempted to rename Lake Ontario.

That “(yet?)” held up very well, alas. The rest of my essay holds up very well too, I think, especially pertaining to how Google and Apple present the change in their respective maps apps:

So whether Google and Apple should show the new name at all
shouldn’t be the question we’re asking. The right question is
necessarily more nuanced: Who should see which names, where? And
Google and Apple’s answers to that question are, alas,
disappointing and worrisome. I’ll repeat the seemingly identical
policy both companies are actually presenting today, by region:

• United States: “Gulf of America”.
• Mexico: “Gulf of Mexico”.
• Everywhere else in the world: “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of
  America)”.

The best politically realistic option they could have chosen would
be (I’ll use italics to emphasize that these are my own
suggestions):

• United States: “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”.
• Everywhere else in the world: “Gulf of Mexico”.

There’s no good reason to even show “Gulf of America” in
parentheses outside the US. We’re the ones with the stupid name
change on the books, so we’re the ones who should get stuck seeing
the stupid name. No one else should suffer the consequences of our
political lunacy. But it is correct to show us, in America, the
new dumb “Gulf of America” name. Again, if it were up to me,
American users would see “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”, and
everyone else would just see “Gulf of Mexico”. But that’s surely
the best we in the reality-based community could hope for.

Earlier in the essay, I wrote:

To ignore political reality is to court political controversy. It
is not in the interests of large multinational corporations to
court controversy. But it’s not possible to avoid controversy.
What is reasonable is to minimize controversy.

Trump has delivered fresh “Lake America” shit sandwiches for Google and Apple to eat. I suggest that the path I recommended 18 months ago remains the path of eating the least shit, maintaining the most integrity, and courting the least collective controversy. Label it “Lake America (Lake Ontario)” to those of us here in the U.S., and keep it as “Lake Ontario” with no mention of Trump’s petulant fiat name anywhere else in the world.