I’ve heard that Trump wants to have Dulles Airport and the Penn Station re-named after him. I guess he is just thinking uncharacteristically small.

America was named, due to a series of false assumptions, after the explorer Amerigo Vespucci (died 1512), a man well enough known in his own time, but now known, if at all, because the name America was derived from his forename.

There were attempts to name America after Christopher Columbus, Columbia, as in “Hail Columbia the Gem of the Ocean,” but that did not catch on. So we’re left with America named after an also-ran 16th-century geographer. Not very grand at all.

So, I propose we change the country’s name to Trumpland or Trumpica or Trumpiania, to give the USA the kind of name it deserves.