Donald Trump has apparently decided that if he can’t get Canada to cave to his demands, he can at least rename one of its lakes.
The president announced Thursday that he is renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” effective immediately, escalating an increasingly bizarre tariff feud with the country’s northern neighbor.
“We’re going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario effective immediately to Lake America,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
And apparently, this isn’t a spur-of-the-moment idea.
“The lake change, the Lake of America, was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, actually,” Trump said.
Because nothing says serious international diplomacy quite like renaming a Great Lake.
Lake Ontario is one of North America’s five Great Lakes, and it happens to sit directly on the U.S.-Canada border.
About 52% of its surface area is in Canada, with the remainder in New York under a 1909 treaty.
So yes, Trump has just announced a new name for a body of water that Canada has been sharing for more than a century.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The announcement comes as relations between the two longtime allies have deteriorated dramatically.
Trade talks between Washington and Ottawa collapsed last week after three days of negotiations, with both sides blaming the other for the breakdown.
Then came the tariffs. Now comes the lake.
This isn’t Trump’s first attempt to redraw the map through executive fiat.
After returning to office last year, Trump ordered the Gulf of Mexico to be renamed the Gulf of America.
The change didn’t exactly rewrite the world’s maps overnight.
The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, part of the Interior Department, took about two weeks to update the official federal nomenclature in its Geographic Names Information System.
The new name applies immediately for federal use.
Whether “Lake America” follows the same process remains to be seen.
But Trump appears determined to make geographical rebranding part of his foreign-policy toolkit.
The lake announcement comes amid an increasingly bitter confrontation with Canada.
The two countries are deeply intertwined economically, with tens of billions of dollars in trade now caught up in Trump’s tariff fight.
Trump has repeatedly criticized Canada and has even floated the idea of making the country the 51st state.
Canadians flat out rejected the pitch.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in May found that 72% of Americans had a favorable view of Canada, the highest favorable rating for any country included in the survey.
That figure was roughly twice Trump’s own approval rating in the poll.
Which makes the president’s decision to pick a fight with a country that Americans overwhelmingly view favorably all the more remarkable.
So, about that lake
There is, of course, a small problem with the whole thing.
Lake Ontario doesn’t belong exclusively to the United States.
It is literally shared with Canada, which has the larger share of the lake.
And unlike changing the name of a federal building or putting a new sign on a government website, you can’t exactly slap a giant “Lake America” sticker across a 7,300-square-mile Great Lake and call it a day.
Trump’s administration can change the name used by the federal government.
Whether Canada—or the rest of the world—decides to use it is another matter entirely.
