Of all the objections raised to President Donald Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario, Fox News host Trey Gowdy landed on one nobody saw coming: the acronym. Gowdy, a lawyer and former Republican representative from South Carolina, told viewers of “The Five” on Thursday, August 27, 2026, that trading “Ontario” for “America” would push the familiar Great Lakes memory aid uncomfortably close, in his view, to the name Hamas.

As in the militant group.

Generations of schoolchildren have used HOMES — Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior — to keep the five Great Lakes straight. Gowdy said the mnemonic took him 12 years to memorize, and he did not sound eager to watch anyone tamper with it now.

A Mnemonic Problem on “The Five”

Under the president’s new name, the “O” in that memory aid becomes an “A” — and that, Gowdy told the panel, is where his hesitation begins.

“The ‘O’ changes to ‘A.’ That’s close to ‘HAMAS,’” Gowdy said.

Plenty of children, he went on, would end up confused by the revised acronym.

“That’s why I haven’t made up my mind on it yet,” he added.

Was that a genuine reservation, or a gentle needling of the president’s latest cartographic venture? Gowdy left that for viewers to sort out. The reasoning was peculiar enough, though, that a co-host stepped in.

Co-host Jessica Tarlov pushed back on Gowdy’s claim during the segment. “No kids know what Hamas is,” she said. The exchange quickly outgrew the studio, bouncing across social media and international news coverage until an obscure squabble over a memory aid ranked among the renaming saga’s most discussed moments.

How the Renaming Unfolded

The map dispute behind Gowdy’s deliberation arrived in three stages. Trump first announced on social media that he planned to rebrand Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” A TikTok video followed, in which he took a pen to a map and wrote the new label across the lake by hand. Then he signed an executive order making the change official.

Last week the Trump administration placed new 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian exports after trade talks collapsed, and Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged to mirror U.S. levies “dollar for dollar.” The lake, meanwhile, is not solely American — Canada owns its northern shoreline, a geographic fact that lent the renaming a pointed edge.

North American waters have been redrawn by this president before. Trump used an executive order on Inauguration Day to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” The Lake Ontario decree came roughly 19 months later.

In a Fox News interview with Gowdy that aired Sunday, August 30, Trump defended the Canada trade fight and dropped his 51st-state push. “We lose all of this tremendous money,” he told Gowdy. “They think they’re a state, but they’re not a state. Why should we be subsidizing Canada?”

Mockery Floods the Internet

Reaction to the Lake Ontario order came fast and without mercy. Jokes about the executive order and the hand-drawn TikTok that preceded it filled social feeds, while other users skipped the commentary and renamed the lake themselves, floating alternatives that ran from the ridiculous to the sharply political. Some worked the letters instead: X users responding to Gowdy’s comment suggested the same five spell a better acronym — “SHAME.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford carried the criticism onto network television. Speaking on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, August 30, he called Trump’s aggressions “the worst thing you could do for the American economy” and “absolutely backwards,” and compared the pettiness of the renaming stunt to “something out of Saturday Night Live.”

The disapproval was not confined to social feeds. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on September 1 found 63 percent of Americans opposed the name change and 14 percent in favor. The survey ran three days and closed Sunday, reaching 1,023 U.S. adults, with a margin of error of about four percentage points. Opposition to the new tariffs on Canadian goods came in at 57 percent in the same poll, against 20 percent support.

Gowdy’s contribution added a fresh twist to the pile-on. Sovereignty, diplomacy and the logistical chore of revising maps, charts and textbooks all went untouched; the Fox News panel instead debated whether HOMES-turned-HAMES sounds close enough to a foreign militant organization to trouble fourth graders.

The clip spread quickly. In India, the Times of India ran the segment under a “Lake Hamas” banner casting Canada as the party getting the last laugh. A trade-war jab has grown into an unexpected political and internet sensation, powered less by the order itself than by the increasingly strange arguments cable television keeps making about it.

On Truth Social on Sunday, August 30, Trump demanded that Canadian companies relocate their headquarters to the U.S. “Many of them are Companies that moved out years ago due to stupid U.S. Leadership,” he wrote, adding, “When you move back, there are no TARIFFS!”

What Comes Next for the Lake

The order itself is slim machinery. It requires the Interior Department to update the Geographic Names Information System so the federal government uses the new name, and does little else. Nothing in it obliges Canada, international mapmakers or the rest of the world to follow along — the same limitation that hemmed in the Gulf of America order, which drew resistance and ridicule of its own.

Whether the Lake Ontario order amounts to anything in practice depends on how widely the new label catches on. Its rhetorical effect is already banked: a president trading blows with Canada over tariffs has kept the dispute in the headlines without touching a single tariff schedule.

And somewhere in South Carolina, a former congressman is still weighing whether five lakes are worth a rewritten acronym.