Sunday, August 30, 2026

This Land is My Brand: From Woody Guthrie to DJ Trump

 President Trump's renaming* of Lake Ontario got me thinking about the famous song by Woody Guthrie, This Land Is Your Land. Its chorus is 

"This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island,
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters;
This land was made for you and me
. "

 

I asked three LLMs to propose Trump versions, and got these three: 

This Land Is My Brand  by Gemini

Chorus
This land is my land, it’s mostly my land,
From Mar-a-Lago to the New York island,
From Lake America to the Gulf of America,
This map was drawn for only me.
########

This Gulf Is My Gulf by Claude:

It's my gulf now, it's my lake now,
Change the name and don't look back now,
One man's word is all it takes now —
This map was made for me alone.
 #########

 This map is my map, by Chat GPT

It’s America’s Gulf, it’s America’s lake,
The greatest new names that a President could make!
They’re beautiful names, everybody agrees—
Ask anybody! Ask anybody! Ask anybody, please!

It’s America’s Gulf, it’s America’s lake,
Tremendous decisions for history’s sake!
The old names were terrible — frankly, a mess—
But these names are the greatest! The greatest! God bless! 

#########

*Names, like language itself, are largely equilibrium phenomena--even for entirely US based names, like Cape Canaveral, which was officially called Cape Kennedy only from 1963 to 1973, when it's earlier name was officially reinstated. 

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