President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order meant to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” taking his apparent jab at Canada one step further as a trade war between the two countries escalates.
The president said the name change was “effective immediately” during a signing ceremony in the Oval Office. The executive order directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to update the Geographic Names Information Service to reflect the name change.
When asked by reporters about the move, Trump said he was sending “no message” to Canada with the name change.
“Lake of America was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” the president said. “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.”
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“If you think about it, we have a Gulf, and we have a lake. Now, all we need is an ocean,” Trump added, floating a potential name change for the Atlantic or Pacific ocean.
The executive order argues that because more of the lake’s volume lies within territory claimed by the United States, Trump has the right to unilaterally change its name.
The name change came two days after Trump had threatened to do so in a Truth Social post, explicitly connecting the move to trade negotiations between the U.S. and Canada that flamed out at the last minute Friday night.
The U.S. and Canada have been entrenched in a trade war since Trump imposed tariffs on America’s northern neighbor in early 2025. In February, the Supreme Court struck down the sweeping international duties that the president levied through a string of executive orders.
But tensions between the trading partners escalated earlier this month when Trump threatened new tariffs of up to 50% on $20 billion in Canadian goods. Canada retaliated with its own sweeping tariffs — further complicating the relationship between the two countries, which exchanged more than $870 billion in annual trade in 2025.
While Trump can unilaterally call the lake a new name, it doesn’t mean other countries, or even localities within the United States, have to abide by it.
A defiant Gov. Kathy Hochul said on X that New York state, which borders the lake, would not follow Trump’s instruction to change the lake’s name.
After Trump’s announcement, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney pointed out that the name predates both the U.S. and Canada. “Ontario” comes from the Wendat indigenous word meaning “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big.”
The Interior Department’s U.S. Geological Survey is the lead agency that handles renaming requests, and Trump’s speedy renaming of the Gulf of Mexico sent the agency into disarray, as NOTUS previously reported.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum continued to call it the Gulf of Mexico, despite Trump’s push to relabel the body of water.
There was also significant bipartisan pushback from Alaska politicians against Trump’s order to change the name of Mount Denali in Alaska back to Mount McKinley. President Barack Obama’s administration changed the name in 2015 to honor Alaskan native groups’ original name for the peak — which translates to “the tall one” — after a decades-long campaign by the state. In 1896, the mountain was named for William McKinley, the 25th U.S. president, who never visited the state.
In the executive order announcing the mountain’s name change, the White House described the move as an effort to restore “names that honor American greatness.”
This story has been updated with further information.
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