President Donald Trump signed an order on Thursday to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” marking a sharp escalation in an ongoing trade dispute with Canada that has already led to tariffs on tens of billions of dollars in cross-border commerce.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump stated that the name change would take effect immediately.
”We’re going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario effective immediately to Lake America,” Trump said. “The lake change, the Lake of America, was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, actually.”
@realdonaldtrumpLAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
♬ original sound – President Donald J Trump The move comes shortly after trade negotiations between the U.S. and Canada collapsed last week. Both nations blamed each other for breaking off three days of high-level talks.
Lake Ontario is one of North America’s five Great Lakes and sits directly on the international border, separating the Canadian province of Ontario from the state of New York. Under a 1909 treaty, approximately 52% of the lake’s surface area belongs to Canada, with the remaining portion falling under New York jurisdiction.
The executive action mirrors a similar step taken shortly after Trump assumed office last year, when he ordered the Gulf of Mexico to be renamed the Gulf of America.
During that previous action, it took roughly two weeks for the U.S. Board on Geographic Names—an entity within the Department of the Interior—to update federal nomenclature. The change was formally applied to the Geographic Names Information System to take immediate effect across federal usage.
