Trump says Google’s Pichai talked him out of renaming the Atlantic Ocean

“No, no, no. This time I’m not doing it… Oceans are different, sir.”

That is what Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said when Donald Trump asked him to rename the Atlantic Ocean, according to Trump. The president told the story at a rally in South Carolina on Wednesday.

Trump said Pichai told him that oceans “cover really a lot of countries”. He told the crowd he would “probably pass” on the idea.

“Please don’t ask us to do that,” Trump quoted Pichai as saying.

Google has not confirmed that the call took place, The Washington Post reported.

“So we have a lake and we have a gulf. Now we need a river and we need an ocean,” he said.

He said he would put “Trump” or “America” only on the Atlantic or the Pacific. So he called Google Maps, which he said had been “really great with the lake”.

He called Pichai and Google co-founder Sergey Brin “totally brilliant guys”. He added that they were “still rattled from the Gulf”.

After dropping the Atlantic, Trump turned to the Pacific. He said he would call it “the American Ocean”.

Trump told a version of the story five days earlier, at a rally in Dalton, Georgia. He said he had sent Google “a little picture” labelled “The Trump Ocean”, CNN reported .

“They said, ‘Sir, look, OK. This one we can’t do. Oceans are different.’ … I said I was only kidding. That time I was,” Trump said in Dalton.

A day later, at a rally in Kentucky, he said he had called Google Maps about the Gulf.

Google relabelled the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America for US users last year. In August, it began showing Lake America in place of Lake Ontario, two days after Trump signed an executive order. Apple Maps followed in September.