The Trump White House has been left red-faced after badly mangling a map of the United States.
The White House’s attempt to promote President Donald Trump’s new obsession with renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” took an embarrassing turn Tuesday when it posted a botched map of the United States on X.
The apparently AI-generated map, made of colorful Legos, relabels the Gulf of Mexico the Trump-approved “Gulf of America,” and the Great Lakes as the as-yet-unrecognized “Lake America.”
But the White House saved its most creative cartography for Washington, D.C., planting the nation’s capital in a fictional patch of America between Virginia and North Carolina, somewhere south of Virginia Beach. The supposed capital is marked by a building that only vaguely resembles the U.S. Capitol.
In reality, D.C. is, of course, tucked between Maryland to the north and Virginia to the south. But the White House mislabeled Delaware “Maryland,” leaving the real Maryland to disappear into cartographic limbo.
In turn, the White House put “Delaware” where New Jersey belongs and merged New Jersey with Connecticut, effectively moving Connecticut below New York and stripping Trump’s hometown of the waterways that surround it.
The map’s geographic fever dream continues northward, where Rhode Island is squeezed into a sliver while New Hampshire stretches impossibly southward, swallowing Massachusetts’ coastline.
The White House, which had not taken the post down by Tuesday afternoon, was quickly called out for its cartographic train wreck.
“Are Republicans okay with Donald Trump wasting their tax dollars on this c---? What happened to the party of fiscal conservatism and delivering value for money to taxpayers? So sad. Ronald Reagan would weep,” one X user commented.
Another wrote, “And this is why kids, you need to stay in school.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Trump administration appears to be in a losing battle with geography. Marco Rubio’s State Department suffered its own blunder last month, when it presented a map of Africa that failed to label a single country in the correct part of the continent.
Used during a State Department presentation at AIDS 2026, a global conference held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a Reuters analysis of the map found that it was made using OpenAI tools and features the company’s watermarks.
The State Department blamed a team member who hastily changed the slide deck before the event.
