His Trade War With Canada Collapsing and His Talk of Annexing It as the "51st State" Going Nowhere, Trump Signed an Executive Order Renaming Lake Ontario — a Great Lake the United States Shares With Canada, Bearing a 400-Year-Old Indigenous Wendat Name That Predates Both Countries — to "Lake America," a Decree That Changes Nothing but a U.S. Federal Database and Which Canada Answered in Four Words: "Then, Now and Always"
On August 27, 2026, six days after trade talks with Canada collapsed and he slapped 50% tariffs on some $20 billion of Canadian goods, Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario — one of the Great Lakes, shared along its entire length by the United States and Canada — to "Lake America," effective "immediately." The order directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to update the U.S. Geographic Names Information System so that "the lake once known as Lake Ontario will, from this day forward, be known as Lake America." It is the second time Trump has renamed an international body of water for his own country, after decreeing the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America." The trouble is that a president can rename a shared lake only in his own government's databases; he cannot rename it in Canada, which owns the other shore, or anywhere else on Earth. Lake Ontario's name is more than four centuries old, derived from the Wendat word "Ontari'io" — "the lake is beautiful, the lake is big" — predating both the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Canadian Confederation. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney answered that his country will call it Lake Ontario "then, now and always"; Ontario Premier Doug Ford agreed. As CNN dryly put it, Trump couldn't make Canada the 51st state, so he settled for renaming its lake. It is statecraft as tantrum: unable to win the trade fight or the annexation fantasy, he reached for the one thing he could do with a pen — erase a neighbor's name from an American spreadsheet and call it a victory.