(Reuters) – The joint venture laid its coverage after sharp users noticed a strange detail: the waters south of Texas were marked as the Gulf of Mexico instead of Trump’s preferred name, the Gulf of America.
The names of international waters have been a hot issue after President Donald Trump signed an executive order early in his second term, renamed it to the U.S. Gulf, and other countries’ names have declined. Since then, he has banned the Associated Press from banning certain White House activities as the Associated Press continued to use the international name, the Gulf of Mexico, which has sparked lawsuits.
The Trump family awarded its name to American Mobile Services, the latest business designed to leverage the president’s political and cultural influence. Reuters comments on the website code show that Trump’s mobile devices appear to have used T-Mobile’s network data for coverage. The coverage map for telecom operators marks the body of water as the Gulf of Mexico.
The map stirred up chats on social media before it was deleted, with many users posting screenshots of the old map. As of early Tuesday morning, the link to the report map with Trump Mobile returned an error saying the page could not be found.
The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to requests for comments about the coverage map removed from the website.
Trump Mobile is powered by Liberty Mobile Wireless, Florida, founded in 2018 by entrepreneur Matthew Lopatin. The company is a mobile virtual network operator that rents bandwidth from major operators such as T-Mobile to provide its own services under different names. The new venture also promises to eventually buy gold smartphones for $499, although it doesn’t say who calls because there is almost no domestic smartphone manufacturing in the United States.
(Reported by Akash Sriram in Bangalore; Editors by David Gaffen and Rod Nickel)
