U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Thursday after signing an executive order to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America.DEMETRIUS FREEMAN/The New York Times
David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.
Donald Trump wants to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. So might the response be, “Goodbye Lake Superior, Hello Lake Canada?”
Of course then Lake Canada, at 82,103 square kilometres, would be superior to Lake America, which checks in at a measly 19,009 square kilometres. In taking the measure of Canada when he ordered Lake Ontario to abandon its centuries-old name, Mr. Trump clearly didn’t take the measure of the individual Great Lakes.
He also didn’t consider the lesson of King Canute, the 11th-century English ruler who was said to have commanded the tides to halt before touching his feet. The tides, of course, paid no mind, just as cartographers across the globe will pay no attention to the executive order signed by Mr. Trump.
Explainer: Trump signed an executive order to rename Lake Ontario. What does it actually change?
Canada (which sits on the north, west, and southwest of Lake Ontario) and most of the rest of the world will ignore this latest blast in the North American trade war, for it will apply to U.S. government agencies and maps but will have no more effect on others than did the President’s 2025 Gulf of America proclamation.
Mr. Trump may have a preoccupation with his role in history, but he’s on shaky grounds when it comes to geography. He didn’t know, for example, that the Canadian province was named for the lake rather than the other way around, just as Michigan acquired its name from the Indigenous term for the lake that hugs the western extremity of the lower part of the state.
But Mr. Trump’s preoccupation with his legacy might come second to his obsession with names.
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A decade ago, he called Marco Rubio, once a competitor for the Republican presidential nomination and now the Secretary of State, “Little Marco.” He called Hillary Clinton “Crooked Hillary” and Joe Biden “Crooked Joe,” though he later added “Sleepy Joe” to the Biden repertoire. Most of that was dismissed; George W. Bush, after all, was fond of renaming people, even to the extent of calling the President of Russia “Pootie Poot” while his White House aides called Jean Chrétien “Dino,” presumably because the Canadian prime minister was in his late 60s at the time.
It’s all fun and games until Mr. Trump, not known as a prankster, vowed in his second inauguration to change the name of the highest peak in North America from Denali – the Indigenous name, one so attached to the peak that Russians employed it when they owned Alaska – to Mount McKinley. It had been called McKinley before, as an homage in 1917 to William McKinley (U.S. president from 1897-1901) until Barack Obama in 2015 restored the original name. The presumed reason for Mr. Trump’s action: The 47th President, with a deep affection for import duties, considered the 25th president the troubadour of tariffs, apparently not knowing that McKinley later repudiated his support for them.
When Mr. Trump moved to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, he sparked a contretemps and lawsuit after the Associated Press, arguing the original name had international recognition, refused to use it. The Trump White House then restricted AP’s access to presidential events and travel.
To First Nations that named Lake Ontario, Trump’s threat doesn’t hold water
Mr. Trump now is engaged in a battle over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His allies on the governing board voted to add his name to the building, a federal court ordered it removed, and in recent days the Justice Department has argued in court that it was within the Trump administration’s rights to add two phrases to the building (“renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump” and “endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund”).
This comes after the administration moved to restore names to military installations that once honoured officers from the Confederate Army. North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, named for slave-owning Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, was renamed Fort Liberty during the Biden years. Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, operating under Mr. Trump’s preferred but unofficial title Secretary of War, restored the Bragg name, fooling nobody in arguing the base now was named for Army paratrooper Ronald Bragg, injured during the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War.
A similar change was made in Jackson, N.H., a town originally named for Andrew Jackson, a president now criticized for his battles against Native Americans. The town kept the name but voted that it now refers to Charles Jackson.
And who exactly was this Mr. Jackson?
He was the federal geologist for the land district around the body of water that some day could be known as Lake Canada.