President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday directing the federal government to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America, a largely symbolic move that comes amid an escalating trade war with Canada.
The order updates the Department of Interior’s naming conventions, making the change official immediately, according to Trump. “As you know, Canada has been ripping us off for a long time on trade. Sad,” Trump said after signing. “Even the military: we defend Canada for nothing. We don’t get anything. They don’t pay us to defend Canada. But we defend Canada.”
Background and rationale for the renaming
Both Canada and the United States are Nato members and have treaty obligations of mutual defense under the North Atlantic Treaty, the Ogdensburg Agreement, and numerous other treaties. An administration official noted that the lake bordering Canada and the state of New York has most of its volume in the United States, and the deepest part of the lake lies in U.S. territory.
“We’ve notified all the various people we have to notify,” Trump said. “This is official effective immediately.”
Previous renaming actions by Trump
This is not the first such action by the president. On his first day of his second term in office, Trump signed an order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
“We have a Gulf and we have a Lake – now all we need is an ocean. Maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “Maybe we’ll change them both.”
Impact and next steps
The renaming of Lake Ontario is expected to affect federal maps and documents, though the move has no direct legal impact on international boundaries or treaties. The administration has not announced a timeline for implementing the change across all federal agencies, but the order directs the Department of Interior to update its records accordingly.
