AMID a spiraling trade war with Canada, United States President Donald Trump says he is renaming a body of water shared between the two countries.
At a Thursday news conference in the Oval Office, Trump signed an executive order that changes the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. The president told reporters the name change will take place “effective immediately”.
When asked what message he was trying to send Canada with the renaming, Trump criticised the country’s trade relationship with US, claiming it “has been ripping us off for a long time”.
“Well, they haven’t treated us well. The Canadian officials have treated us very badly. They’re nasty people,” Trump said.
“So the lake change – the Lake of America – was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, actually.”
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has been embroiled in a renewed trade dispute with the US, dismissed the president’s order in a post on social media.
“We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms,” Carney wrote on X. “Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.”
Trump’s executive order comes days after negotiations between the two countries fell apart, which occurred hours before the August 22 deadline to avoid 50-percent tariffs on $20bn worth of Canadian goods.
Canada has responded with retaliatory measures, taxing roughly 700 US products valued at roughly the same amount.
Thursday’s order is not the first time Trump has renamed a geographical feature since the start of his second term.
Upon returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump signed an executive order that rebranded the “Gulf of Mexico” as the “Gulf of America”.
In the order, Trump justified the name change by stating the gulf “has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America”.
However, cartographers and governments have used “Gulf of Mexico” for nearly 500 years, long before the US officially became a country.
Despite sharing a name with Canada’s most populous province, Lake Ontario took its official designation from the Huron Indigenous people’s word “oniatari:io”, which translates to “lake of shining waters”. The province, founded in 1867, took its name from the body of water.
In the same 2025 order that renamed the Gulf of Mexico, Trump also reversed a decision by former President Barack Obama that changed the federal name of the state of Alaska’s Mount McKinley to Denali, which is how Indigenous people in the area have historically referred to North America’s highest peak.
Trump said he switched back the mountain’s name to honour the 25th US president, William McKinley.
Critics of the renaming trend, including some within his own Republican Party, were quick to condemn Thursday’s executive order.
“With all the challenges facing our country, this is what the President chooses to spend his time doing today and communicating to the American people and the rest of the world,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wrote on X. “Childish. Completely childish.”
Others, like Trump’s former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews, were even more candid.
“I bet this goes so f***ing hard if you’re stupid,” Matthews said.
Despite the criticism, Thursday’s order is largely symbolic and does not compel Canada to comply. It only affects how the US federal government refers to the name.
Mexico, for instance, does not recognize Trump’s “Gulf of America” rebranding, nor do many other countries and international groups. However, companies like the tech giant Alphabet, the maker of the widely-used app Google Maps, observed the order for users who perform searches within the US.
Trump’s name change policy has also been a source of friction between the president and news outlets. Last year, Trump sought to bar The Associated Press news agency from certain White House events over its use of the term “Gulf of Mexico”.
During Thursday’s Oval Office signing, Trump teased possible America-themed name changes for other bodies of water bordering the US.