Aboard Air Force One, en route to the Super Bowl in New Orleans, President Trump held a news conference. As the flight entered international waters over the Gulf of Mexico, he issued an executive order renaming it the “Gulf of America” and declaring Feb. 9 as “Gulf of America Day.” The order, titled Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness, also renamed Denali, North America’s tallest peak, back to Mount McKinley.

Google and Apple Maps have adopted the “Gulf of America” name, but the change has faced resistance from other nations, including Mexico and the United Kingdom.

Watch the video above as Straight Arrow News contributor Jordan Reid argues that Trump’s move is an attempt to reaffirm a certain kind of power — “based on spectacle” — to shore up “support among the nationalist wing of his party.”

The following is an excerpt from the above video:

This is about playing into a certain brand of Republicanism that views international cooperation — and, let’s be honest, anything with “Mexico” in the name — as something to be erased, rewritten, or dominated. It’s also about distracting from the very real legal and political challenges facing him.

Why talk about his multiple criminal trials or answer tough policy questions about the economy or foreign policy when you can pull the focus of the news cycle with a stunt?

But here’s the kicker: The stunt probably worked. Even if this announcement has no legal standing, even if every government map from NOAA to the Pentagon to your local weather report continues to call it the Gulf of Mexico, Trump supporters will believe it.

If he demands that Fox News start using the name, they very well might comply. Because in Trump’s ever-expanding world, reality is what he says it is. The world is not what is, but what he declares it to be.