As the trade war with Canada escalates, US President Donald Trump has announced that he will rename the waters shared between the two countries.
During a press conference Thursday in the Oval Office, President Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario to American Lakes. The president told reporters that the name change is “effective immediately.”
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Asked what message he was trying to send to Canada by changing its name, Trump criticized the country’s trade relationship with the United States, saying it “has been exploited by us for a long time.”
“They haven’t treated us well. Canadian officials have treated us very badly. They’re mean people,” Trump said.
“So lake change, American Lakes, is actually something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.”
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is embroiled in a new trade dispute with the United States, dismissed the president’s order in a social media post.
“We know America is changing: our trade relations, our foreign policy, our national monuments, our hydronyms,” Carney wrote of X. “Canadians also know that naming a reality meant calling it Lake Ontario, then, now, and always will.”
President Trump’s executive order came days after negotiations between the two countries broke down hours before an Aug. 22 deadline to avoid 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods.
Canada responded with retaliatory measures, taxing about 700 U.S. products for roughly the same amount.
Thursday’s order is not the first time President Trump has changed geographic names since the start of his second term.
Upon returning to the White House in January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order renaming the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America.”
President Trump justified the name change by saying in an executive order that the bay “has long been a vital asset to our once-fast-growing nation and remains an indelible part of the United States.”
But cartographers and governments have been using the “Gulf of Mexico” for nearly 500 years, long before the United States officially became a nation.
Although Lake Ontario shares its name with Canada’s most populous province, its official name comes from the Huron First Nations word oniatari:io, meaning “lake of shining waters.” Founded in 1867, the state’s name comes from its body of water.
In the same 2025 executive order that renamed the Gulf of Mexico, President Trump also reversed former President Barack Obama’s decision to change the federal name of Alaska’s Mount McKinley to Denali. Historically, this is what the indigenous peoples of this region called the highest mountain in North America.
President Trump said he was restoring the mountain’s name in honor of William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States.
Critics of the name change trend, including within his own Republican Party, were quick to condemn Thursday’s executive order.
“Given all the challenges facing our country, the president chose to spend his time today telling the American people and the world,” said former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. “It’s childish. It’s completely childish.”
Others, like President Trump’s former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews, were even more outspoken.
“If you’re stupid, this is going to be a lot of trouble,” Matthews said.
Despite criticism, Thursday’s order is largely symbolic and does not force Canada to comply. This only affects how the U.S. federal government refers to the name.
Mexico, for example, does not recognize President Trump’s rebranding of the Gulf of America, nor do many other countries and international organizations. But companies like tech giant Alphabet, maker of the widely used app Google Maps, were observing the order in which users performed searches in the United States.
President Trump’s name change policy is also a source of friction between the president and the press. Last year, President Trump tried to ban The Associated Press from certain White House events over its use of the term “Gulf of Mexico.”
During the signing in the Oval Office on Thursday, President Trump hinted at possible American-themed name changes for other bodies of water that border the United States.
“We have bays and we have lakes. All we need now is the ocean,” Trump said. “So we’ll probably have to change the name of either the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean. We’ll probably change both.”
