President Donald Trump signed an executive order on August 27, 2026, meant to give official weight to his plan to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” a day after a video surfaced showing him crossing the Great Lake’s name off a map by hand with a Sharpie. The order, No. 14422, gives the Interior Department and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names 30 days to act, a clock that runs out September 26. The clip landed on the president’s TikTok account under the caption “LAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
In it, the 80-year-old president sits in the Oval Office holding up a map of the lake, whose shoreline the United States and Canada share.
A Map, a Marker and a Caption
Trump opened by noting that the lake sits in both countries, then announced 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 crossed out the name, wrote “LAKE AMERICA” above it and declared Lake Ontario gone, according to the video — a nod to the order he signed on the first day of his second term seeking to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
The video followed a public trial balloon. Writing 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 War Behind the Stunt
Relations were already deteriorating when the map came out. Tariffs of 50 percent on about $20 billion in Canadian goods, proclaimed in July and delayed once, took effect after midnight on Saturday, August 22, once last-minute talks collapsed. “We were attacked. You’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said. 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.
Then it turned personal. Trump wrote on Truth Social on August 24 of “lots of ‘bluster’ from Doug Ford,” calling the Ontario premier “the less charismatic, intelligent, and overall unimpressive brother of the late, great, Rob Ford” and referring to him as Carney’s “Flunky.” Ford answered the same day, telling Ottawa radio that Trump could “kiss my ass” and repeating it at a Hamilton news conference, where he added: “I’m not going to take any advice off a guy that’s the king of bankruptcies.”
The lake is only one of the grievances. Wildfire smoke drifting south from Canada has prompted Trump to warn of retaliation, and the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit has set off a fight of its own: Canada financed the span’s C$6.4 billion construction in full, yet an agreement released days before it opened July 27 commits Ottawa to hand Washington half the net crossing revenues for 15 years. Real money rides on the playground insults, with the tariffs and countermeasures expected to raise prices on both sides of the border.
What a Renaming Would Actually Do
Renaming a shared body of water takes more than a marker and a steady hand. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which sits under the Interior Department and is administered by the U.S. Geological Survey, sets how federal agencies use geographic names. Even approval there would bind no other nation, leaving Canadian maps, textbooks and weather forecasts free to carry on unchanged.
The Gulf of America order ran into the same limitation. Mexico refused the change and sued Google over it; Britain declined, citing common English usage; and The Associated Press refused and was barred from White House events. The same split has already opened over the lake. Google updated its maps so that American users see “Lake America,” Canadian users see “Lake Ontario” and everyone else sees both, and Apple Maps followed on September 1 with the identical three-tier scheme. MapQuest declined outright — “We’re not changing it,” the company posted — and the refusal carried its app to No. 1 in the App Store’s navigation category.
Trump’s Long-Running Sharpie Habit
The tool surprised no one. Trump is a Sharpie loyalist — the marker is sold by a U.S.-based company owned by Newell Brands — and he pulls one out at formal and casual occasions alike. At a Cabinet meeting on March 26 he said he had phoned the head of Sharpie to have custom black markers bearing gold White House logos made for the building at roughly $5 each, against the $1,000 he once paid for pens. A spokesperson for Newell Brands said it had no information about that call.
Nor is it the first map a Trump Sharpie has altered. In September 2019 he used one to change a weather chart showing the forecast track of Hurricane Dorian.
The target this time is a 7,340-square-mile lake shared with a longtime ally whose prime minister has already compared the administration’s tariffs to war, and the reaction has crossed party lines. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the state “won’t be calling it that.” Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., introduced the Hands Off Our Great Lakes Act on August 31 to protect the official names of all five lakes, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand announced a Senate companion on September 4. Vermont’s Republican Gov. Phil Scott called it “petty and disappointing.” The Seneca Nation, calling the order a treaty violation, demanded it be rescinded, its president, J. Conrad Seneca, saying the president “cannot assert ownership over our culture or erase it through irresponsible political action.” No lawsuit has been filed.
Carney said the name is “more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.” On August 29 Ford unveiled a 24-by-12-foot bilingual sign on the Ontario shore reading “Lake Ontario. Now and Always.” Trump answered the same day with an AI video of himself kicking over a “Welcome to Lake Ontario” sign and dancing. With the Interior deadline days away, neither capital looks ready to blink.