The rebrand comes as the US and Canada engage in a cross-border trade war after Trump increased tariffs last week.
Published On 27 Aug 2026
Amid a spiraling trade war with Canada, United States President Donald Trump says he is renaming a body of water shared between the two countries.
At a Tuesday news conference in the Oval Office, Trump signed an executive order that changes the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. The president told reporters the name change will take place “effective immediately”.
Recommended Stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
When asked what message he was trying to send Canada with the renaming, Trump criticised the country’s trade relationship with US, claiming it “has been ripping us off for a long time”.
“Well, they haven’t treated us well. The Canadian officials have treated us very badly. They’re nasty people,” Trump said.
“So the lake change – the Lake of America – was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, actually,” he added.
It’s not the first time Trump has renamed a geographical feature that has a name with ties to a neighboring country.
Upon returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump immediately signed an executive order that rebranded the “Gulf of Mexico” as the “Gulf of America”.
In the order, Trump justified the name change by stating the gulf “has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America”.
However, cartographers and governments have used “Gulf of Mexico” for nearly 500 years, long before the US officially became a country.
Despite sharing a name with Canada’s most populous province, Lake Ontario took its official designation from the Huron Indigenous people’s word “oniatarí:io”, which translates to “lake of shining waters”. The province, founded in 1867, took its name from the body of water.
During Thursday’s Oval Office signing, Trump teased possible America-themed name changes for other bodies of water bordering the US.
“We have a gulf and we have a lake. Now all we need is an ocean,” Trump said. “So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”
