The Associated Press said it will not refer to Lake Ontario as “Lake America” unless it’s deemed “relevant,” despite President Donald Trump’s executive order to rename the body of water.
The AP provides a leading style and formatting guide for journalists, and the publication has faced criticism from the Trump administration for keeping the original names of other landmarks.
“The Associated Press will refer to Lake Ontario by its original name, including the name Trump has chosen when relevant,” AP spokesperson Patrick Maks said in a statement to The Washington Post published Wednesday. “As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are recognizable to broad audiences.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the guidance from the AP.
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Trump’s Aug. 27 executive order directed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to update the Geographic Names Information System to reflect Lake Ontario’s name change. The president personally applied pressure on companies like Apple to make the update.
The name change for the body of water that borders both the U.S. and Canada comes as the two countries are locked in an escalating, tit-for-tat trade war.
“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,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote last month on X in opposition to Trump’s order.
The AP’s online stylebook points to that dispute: “The border between the United States and Canada runs through Lake Ontario. Trump’s order only affects how the United States government refers to the body of water. Canada, as well as other countries and international bodies, are not required to recognize the name change, and Canada has said it will not.”
Since the start of his second administration, Trump changed the names of several bodies of water and land features, and he has recently teased renaming states to display more America-centric titles.
The AP did not follow Trump’s lead to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” The publication cited its status as a “global news agency that disseminates news around the world” and asserted that the “body of water has shared borders between the U.S. and Mexico,” so Trump’s executive order would only carry weight in the U.S.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum also did not comply with Trump’s directive to rename the gulf, saying, “For us it is still the Gulf of Mexico, and for the entire world it is still the Gulf of Mexico.”
The AP did abide by Trump’s order to rename Alaska’s Denali as Mount McKinley. Even though lawmakers changed the name in 2015 from McKinley to Denali — which translates to “the tall one” in Alaskan Native languages — Trump pushed to “restore the name of a great president.”
“The area lies solely in the United States and as president, Trump has the authority to change federal geographical names within the country,” the AP wrote in its style guidance on the mountain.
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