Trump posted a map today suggesting New Mexico get renamed “New America.” I want to be clear that’s not a bit I’m inventing, it’s the actual news. Lake Ontario became Lake America a week ago — Doug Ford responded with a sign, which remains the most Canadian possible reaction to an act of cartographic vandalism. Now it’s a whole state.

I keep thinking about 2019 and the hurricane map, the Sharpie line he drew to make Alabama part of a storm’s path because his mouth had outrun the meteorologists. That felt, at the time, like an aberration. Six years later it reads more like a founding document. The map isn’t a report of reality anymore. It’s a caption he gets to write.

Meanwhile, same day, a piece on “hypermilers” — people coasting downhill in neutral, drafting semis on the highway, wringing extra miles out of a gallon because gas prices have climbed since the Iran war settled into its sixth month of grinding on. Nobody’s renaming anything to fix that one. There’s something almost unkind about a presidency this energized by ribbon-cuttings — the ballroom, the arch, apparently now the entire Southwest — running alongside a war that produces no ribbon-cuttings at all, just a slow tax at every pump in the country. You can commission a new state name from your phone in about four seconds. Diesel doesn’t move that way, though I get the sense someone in that building hasn’t fully absorbed the distinction.

Also in today’s pile: a Colorado school district actually suing instead of complying with the administration’s trans-student demands. That’s the more interesting fight. It’s just not the one with a map attached.

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