US renamed a lake, threatened a strait, then cast the only vote against fixing Africa's map.

…(cont) More than six months into a war he started with Iran, a war whose closure of the Strait of Hormuz had already pushed diesel prices toward a record, the President posted that the strait was "under USA control" and mused about renaming it "TRUMP STRAIT," adding that it would be "hotter than ever before." A shipping lane at the center of a fuel-price spike, floated as a naming-rights opportunity, by the man whose war spiked it.

Three days later, the United Nations took its own vote on a map. The Equal Earth projection, introduced by a group of West African nations, adjusts the depiction of Africa and other regions to their true size. The body passed it 164 to one, with six abstentions. The one was the United States. Washington's delegation branded it a "radical ideological project" and voted no — the same government that had spent the preceding week deciding a lake and a shipping lane could use its president's name instead of their own.

Line them up and the count tells you what a map is for, in this administration: not accuracy, but ownership. A lake gets renamed by memo. A war zone gets pitched as a naming-rights deal. When the actual size of a continent came up for a vote, the country that renames things for sport cast the only vote to keep the world the wrong shape. They read the map fine. They just didn't like whose name wasn't on it.