Three days after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president, a State Department official sent a seemingly exasperated email to Michael Tischler, director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Geospatial Program.
The problem: How to manage press inquiries “left and right” about Trump’s plan to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.”
“We seem to be caught in a circular messaging wheel,” the unidentified State Department official wrote Tischler on Jan. 23, describing how different government agencies kept referring press inquiries to others — and back again.