A day after video surfaced of him scratching a Great Lake’s name off a map by hand with a Sharpie, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on August 27, 2026, meant to give his plan to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” official weight. The clip went up on the president’s TikTok account with the caption “LAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Order No. 14422 handed the Interior Department and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names 30 days to act, and the paperwork moved faster than that. The U.S. Geographic Names Information System updated the database on August 29, well ahead of the September 26 deadline the order set, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency followed the same day. Google Maps began showing “Lake America” to users in the United States within days, and Apple Maps followed on about September 1.
The video shows the 80-year-old president seated in the Oval Office, holding up a map of the lake, whose shoreline the United States and Canada share. Audio on the post is listed as “original sound – President Donald J Trump.”
A Marker, a Map and a Caption
Trump began by pointing out that the lake sits in both countries, then sprang his edit. “But we’re gonna make a little change. We’re gonna call it something different than Lake Ontario,” Trump said in the clip. “And all it takes is a good pen and some intelligence.”
He struck through the old name, printed “LAKE AMERICA” above it and pronounced Lake Ontario gone, according to the video. America, he went on, now had both a lake and a gulf carrying its name — a nod to the executive order he signed on the first day of his second term seeking to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, an effort that also drew ridicule.
A public trial balloon had come first. On Truth Social on Tuesday, August 25, Trump said the United States was “giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to [be] doing much business with Ontario any longer.”
The Trade Fight Behind the Stunt
The map came out while relations between Washington and Ottawa were unraveling by the day. Last-minute talks collapsed, and a 50 percent tariff on about $20 billion in Canadian goods — proclaimed in July, then delayed once — took effect after midnight on Saturday, August 22. “We were attacked — like you’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said in Ottawa hours after they took effect. Canada announced countermeasures on August 25 covering C$27.6 billion in U.S. imports at rates of 15, 25 and 50 percent, effective September 8.
The dispute has since turned personal. Trump wrote on Truth Social on August 24 of “lots of ‘bluster’ from Doug Ford,” describing the Ontario premier as “the less charismatic, intelligent, and overall unimpressive brother of the late, great, Rob Ford” and calling him Carney’s “Flunky.” Ford answered the same day on Ottawa radio, saying Trump could “kiss my ass,” then used the line again at a Hamilton news conference: “I don’t respond to a dictator like President Trump, a bully like President Trump … I’m not going to take any advice off a guy that’s the king of bankruptcies.” Ford answered the renaming on August 29 with a sign roughly 18 feet tall at Fifty Point Conservation Area near Grimsby, reading “Lake Ontario. Now and Always” in English and French.
The Response So Far
No court challenge to the order has been filed. The Seneca Nation demanded on August 28 that it be rescinded, citing the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua and the absence of tribal consultation, and three House Democrats — Tim Kennedy and Joe Morelle of New York and Debbie Dingell of Michigan — introduced the Hands Off Our Great Lakes Act on August 31 to nullify it. Polling has been unkind: a Reuters/Ipsos survey taken August 28 to 30 found 63 percent of Americans opposed to the renaming, including 43 percent of Republicans, and an Economist/YouGov poll put opposition at 68 percent. Canada’s counter-tariffs remain scheduled for September 8.
The lake is only one grievance among several. Trump has already warned of retaliation of some kind over wildfire smoke drifting south from Canada, and he has sparred with Canadian officials about sharing revenue or ownership of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which links Windsor, Ontario, with Detroit. Canada financed in full the span’s C$6.4 billion construction, and a July agreement gives the United States half of the crossing’s net revenues for its first 15 fiscal years.