Trump Floats Renaming the Strait of Hormuz After Himself as Transits Fall to Eight Ships a Day
President Trump asked his followers on Wednesday whether the Strait of Hormuz should be renamed the Trump Strait. The reason he gave was ownership. “Now that we have it under U.S.A. control,” the post began, before promising the new name would be hotter than ever before, like America itself. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
The timing is the interesting part. He posted this the day after telling the same audience that the American position in the war is fine because Washington has almost total control of the strait. Almost. Three weeks earlier there was no qualifier at all, just total control and a naval blockade being called a wall of steel. The trophy is being engraved while the claim behind it is quietly shrinking.
The Renaming Habit
None of this is out of character, and it isn’t really about Hormuz. Less than a week ago he signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to call Lake Ontario “Lake America,” which went down about as well in Ottawa as you would expect. Before that came the Gulf of Mexico, the Kennedy Center, the United States Institute of Peace, a new dollar coin with his face on it, and a 22-foot statue at his own golf club in Miami. There is a pattern, and the pattern is older than the presidency. It ran through the hotels, the towers, the steaks.
He also tested the Hormuz version months ago, in March, at an investment summit in Miami, where he called it the Strait of Trump and then made a show of correcting himself. He told the room there are no accidents with him. On that one point he was probably telling the truth. He reshared an AI-generated map with the new label at the end of April, and another in August marking the waterway as new U.S. territory. Wednesday’s post is the fourth or fifth run at the same idea. It keeps coming back because nobody has found a way to make it stick.
Whose Water It Actually Is
The strait doesn’t have an owner. It’s an international waterway, and the water itself sits inside the territorial seas of Iran and Oman. That second country matters and almost never gets mentioned. Oman has been the mediation channel for most of this war. Iran’s foreign minister said in April that the future of Hormuz would be settled between Tehran and Muscat. Whatever you think of that claim, renaming the strait after an American president writes Oman out of a waterway it has a legal share of, at the exact moment Washington needs Muscat to keep passing messages.
The existing name isn’t Iranian branding either. It comes from the old kingdom and island of Hormuz, a trading power that ran the Gulf centuries before anyone drew the current borders. Replacing that with a surname is not a small edit to a map. It’s a claim that six months of blockade outweighs six hundred years of use.
Tehran has answered every version of this. The deputy foreign minister said the strait has been Iranian, is Iranian, and will stay Iranian, and that it can’t be seized by a post or an aircraft carrier. The head of the Basij says the waterway is under Iranian control and management. The Persian Gulf Strait Authority, the body Iran set up to run transits and collect its toll, says American statements don’t change what’s on the water.
Eight Ships
And what’s on the water is the problem with the whole exercise. Transits fell to eight vessels, under a ten-day average of about twelve, the lowest daily count since 5 August. Before the war started on 28 February, roughly 130 ships a day went through, carrying about 20 million barrels of crude and products. Traffic has dropped further this week as strikes resumed after a lull.
Eight. That is the throughput of the asset being named. You do not get to call something the busiest chokepoint in the world and also call it yours when your own blockade is most of the reason nothing is moving. Control of a strait, in any sense a shipowner would recognise, means hulls going through it. Charterers aren’t asking who the strait is named after. They’re asking about war-risk premiums, and the answer is keeping them out.
The Pipeline Tell
Here’s the detail that gives the game away. Pressed on whether the region is still exporting, the administration says total volumes now beat pre-war levels. That’s only true if you count the Saudi and Emirati pipelines that were built specifically to avoid Hormuz. The energy secretary made the point on CNBC this week: oil will leave the Gulf with or without Iran.
Read that again. The defence of the Hormuz policy is that the Gulf has learned to do without Hormuz. Every barrel moved to the East-West line or to Fujairah is a barrel that no longer needs the strait, and every one of those barrels makes the name on the map worth slightly less. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have spent six months turning a chokepoint into an option. If that continues, the prize gets a new name and a smaller role at the same time.
There’s no mechanism here anyway. International hydrographic naming works by consensus and long use, and the last attempt went nowhere outside American government documents. Mexico still calls it the Gulf of Mexico. Iran and Oman will keep calling this the Strait of Hormuz, and so will every chart, insurer and port agent that has to survive the next administration.
Which leaves the post as what it plainly is. A flag planted in water nobody is sailing through.