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7 hours ago
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When Donald Trump returned to office in January this year, one of the first things he did was sign an executive order to officially rename the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America". It was a signature move, but it seems his own team might have forgotten about it. The rollout for the new Trump Mobile service, a venture headed by his sons, is already facing issues with its pre-orders, and now has a whole new self-inflicted problem to deal with.
A post from Travis Akers (@travisakers) has shown that the Trump Mobile official coverage map, intended to show potential customers their signal strength, prominently featured the name "Gulf of Mexico." It appears shortly after Akers's post went live, the Trump team took down the page, so if you visit trumpmobile.com/coverage, you would get a 404 error. Anyways, here's a screen recording of what the page looked like before the take down (double click to enlarge):
So, how could the Trump team make such a mistake on something so politically important to them? From the recording, it looks like the coverage map is powered by Mapbox, a popular location platform for developers. Mapbox, by default, still uses "Gulf of Mexico" because its core map data is built on global sources like OpenStreetMap, which have not adopted the unilateral name change.
Even though the official name is different in the US, these global datasets stick to the international consensus. Other tech companies, like Google, address this by changing their maps to display "Gulf of America" only for users in the US, a decision that annoyed the president of Mexico. The funny thing is, fixing this would have been pretty simple. Mapbox is quite flexible, and you can edit "natural features", including bodies of water. Here's how we did it (click to enlarge):
The Trump Mobile coverage map has been offline for over five hours, as the Trump team presumably works to fix the issue and bring the page back online.
