A day after taking a Sharpie to a map of the Great Lakes in a TikTok video, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on August 27, 2026, meant to lend official weight to his plan to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Posted Wednesday, August 26, to the president’s TikTok account, the clip carried the caption “LAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
The order instructs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and his department to update the Geographic Names Information System, and it states: “The United States is the greatest protector of the Great Lakes, including the body of water currently known as Lake Ontario.” In the Oval Office, Trump said: “The Lake of America was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, actually. As you know, we took something called the Gulf of Mexico — we changed it — and now it’s very routinely the Gulf of America.”
The clip 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.”
The Map, the Marker and the Caption
The lake sits in both countries, Trump began, before getting to 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.”
Striking through the existing name, he wrote “LAKE AMERICA” above it and declared that Lake Ontario was gone, according to the video. The country, he continued, now had a lake and a gulf carrying America’s 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.
He had floated the idea publicly first. 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.”
A Trade War Behind the Stunt
Relations between Washington and Ottawa were deteriorating rapidly when the map appeared. After last-minute talks collapsed, 50 percent tariffs on about $20 billion in Canadian goods took effect after midnight on Saturday, August 22; they had been proclaimed on July 20 and pushed back three days. “You’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said. Canada’s countermeasures, announced on August 25, cover C$27.6 billion in U.S. imports with rates of 15, 25 and 50 percent and took effect September 8.
The dispute has since turned personal. On Truth Social on August 24, Trump wrote 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 referring to him as Carney’s “Flunky.” Speaking in Hamilton that same day, Ford answered: “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.” Earlier that morning, on the radio, he had said Trump could “kiss my ass.” The next day, August 25, Ford dismissed the renaming as rhetoric.
Other grievances feed the quarrel. Trump has already warned of some kind of retaliation over wildfire smoke drifting south from Canada, and he has sparred with Canadian officials over revenue sharing or ownership of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which links Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit. Canada financed the span’s C$6.4 billion construction in full, and a July 10 agreement now splits its toll profits with the United States.
Behind the playground insults sits real money. Both the tariffs and the countermeasures are expected to raise prices on certain goods on either side of the border, even as the White House argues its case in half-minute social media clips amid escalating tensions online.
What a Renaming Would Actually Change
Renaming a shared body of water takes considerably more than a marker and a steady hand. Federal agencies take their geographic names from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, a board under the Interior Department that the U.S. Geological Survey administers. Approval there, however, would bind no other nation: Canadian maps, Canadian textbooks and Canadian weather forecasts could carry on unchanged.
The Gulf of America order ran into that same wall. Mexico refused the change and sued Google over it; Britain declined, citing common English usage; and The Associated Press, which also refused, was barred from White House events. The lake has opened the same split. Google updated its maps on Saturday, August 29, so American users now see “Lake America,” Canadian users see “Lake Ontario” and everyone else sees both. Apple followed on September 1, confirming that U.S. users of Apple Maps would see “Lake America” after the Geographic Names Information System was changed. MapQuest declined outright: “We’re not changing the name of Lake Ontario.” Its app was the top free download in the Apple App Store by September 1.
The order drew objections closer to the lake. Seneca Nation President J. Conrad Seneca called on August 28 for Trump to rescind it, saying the change violated the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua and that the president “cannot assert ownership over our culture or erase it through irresponsible political action.” Three House Democrats introduced a bill on August 31, the Hands Off Our Great Lakes Act, that would bar the president and the Interior secretary from renaming any of the five Great Lakes.
