White House Blocks Reporter From Oval Office Over ‘Gulf Of America’ Battle, AP Says

The White House blocked an Associated Press reporter from entering the Oval Office on Tuesday over the AP’s refusal to use “Gulf of America,” the Associated Press said in a statement on Tuesday evening.

The Associated Press crafts a stylebook that many newsrooms across the world religiously adhere to — for example, the AP style guide recommends using “gender-affirming care” to describe transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers, even when discussing minors, and to use the phrase “pregnant people” and  “people seeking abortions” to describe women seeking to abort their unborn babies.

Recently the AP made the decision not to adhere to President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, arguing in a January 23 statement that the Gulf of America shares borders between the U.S. and Mexico and that Trump’s order “only carries authority within the United States.”

On our updated Transgender Topical Guide: trans-exclusionary radical feminist.
We recommend avoiding the vague and politicized term to describe cisgender women or others who object to the inclusion of transgender women in women’s spaces.https://t.co/HEBdoiEWnM pic.twitter.com/zSet75MbU5

— APStylebook (@APStylebook) June 14, 2023

“Mexico, as well as other countries and international bodies, do not have to recognize the name change,” the AP statement said. “The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.”

The statement also said that the AP would follow Trump’s executive order reverting the name of “North America’s tallest peak, Denali in Alaska, to Mount McKinley,” since the area lies solely in the United States. Former President Barack Obama had changed Mount McKinleys name to Denali to “reflect the traditions of Alaska Natives,” but Trump’s executive order said that the president wanted to “restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley.”

On Tuesday, after Trump recognized February 9 as the first ever Gulf of America Day, the AP said that one of its reporters had been blocked from entering the Oval Office over the publication’s decision.

The president had signed an executive order on January 20 “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness” that called on the the Secretary of the Interior to “take all appropriate actions to rename as the ‘Gulf of America’ the U.S. Continental Shelf area bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the State of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba in the area formerly named as the Gulf of Mexico.”

US President Donald Trump, King Abdullah II of Jordan and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio attend a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 11, 2025. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

“Today we were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office,” the Associated Press statement said. “This afternoon[,] AP’s reporter was blocked from attending an executive order signing.”

“It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism,” the statement continued. “Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.”

Eugene Daniels, the president of the White House Correspondents Association, also sent out a statement Tuesday evening arguing that “in the relationship between the press and the Office of the President, coverage and standards are entirely in the purview of individual organizations.”

“The White House cannot dictate how news organizations report the news, nor should it penalize working journalists because it is unhappy with their editors’ decisions,” Daniels said on Tuesday evening. “The move by the administration to bar a reporter from The Associated Press from an official event open to news coverage today is unacceptable. The WHCA stands with The Associated Press and calls on the administration to immediately change course.”

The White House declined to comment on the matter to The Daily Wire.