Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has taken a satirical jab at President Donald Trump’s effort to rename the Gulf of Mexico and annex Greenland.
A straight-faced Pritzker released a choreographed video on Friday, with fake camera shutter clicks going off in the background, where he asserts that he is renaming Lake Michigan to ‘Lake Illinois,’ poking fun at Trump’s recent executive order where he changed the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America.
‘The world’s finest geographers, experts who study the Earth’s natural environment, have concluded a decades-long council and determined that a great lake deserves to be named after a great state,’ Pritzker said.
‘So today, I’m issuing a proclamation declaring that hereinafter, Lake Michigan shall be known as Lake Illinois. The proclamation has been forwarded to Google to ensure the world’s maps reflect this momentous change.’
Trump signed Executive Order 14172 on his first day back in office which changed the name of the ocean basin. The order also renamed the highest peak in North America to ‘Mount McKinley,’ reversing the 2015 decision to call it by its centuries-old name Denali.
Google has said it will make Trump’s changes once the Department of the Interior updates the Geographic Names Information System. As of today, Google Maps still refers to it as the Gulf of Mexico.
In the video, Pritzker then switches his attention to Green Bay, a Wisconsin city near Lake Michigan. And just like how Trump vowed to take over Greenland from Denmark, Pritzker pledged to snap up Green Bay from The Badger State.
‘In addition, the recent announcement that to protect the homeland, the United States will be purchasing Greenland… Illinois will now be annexing Green Bay to protect itself against enemies, foreign and domestic,’ Pritzker said.
‘I’ve also instructed my team to work diligently to prepare for an important announcement next week regarding the Mississippi River.’
‘God bless America and bear down,’ Pritzker said, a nod to Wisconsin’s Green Bay Packers, one of Chicago Bears’ biggest rivals.
The video comes on the heels of a Justice Department lawsuit filed against the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago for allegedly interfering with federal immigration enforcement with its sanctuary polices.
The lawsuit claims that several state and local laws are designed to interfere with the federal government’s enforcement of federal immigration law in violation of the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution.
Pritzker and Trump have also clashed over Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, with Pritzker declaring the move unconstitutional.
Trump’s order, ‘Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,’ asserts that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution does not automatically confer American citizenship to individuals who are born within the United States.
They also feuded during Trump’s first term in office when Pritzker claimed the state only recovered a quarter of its requested personal protective equipment from the federal government.