President Donald Trump signed an order to rename one of the five Great Lakes along the U.S.-Canada border in a fit of rage over his ongoing trade war with Ottawa that appears to have no end in sight.
On Thursday, Trump signed an order directing federal agencies to refer to Lake Ontario as “Lake America” in all official documents and records, echoing a similar move from early in his second term when he attempted to unilaterally rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
While the president does have the authority to direct how the government recognizes the names of places and landmarks, he cannot force Canada or individual citizens on either side of the border to follow his preferred naming conventions.
The move, intended as a branch to a flagging political base that has grown increasingly disenchanted with his presidency and his administration’s failure to address the cost of living concerns that drove them to vote for him nearly two years ago, comes as Trump continues to antagonize traditional American allies for no apparent reason other than his own deeply-ingrained belief that the country has somehow been disrespected by allies who act as sovereign states rather than vassals.
Speaking in the Oval Office as he signed the order, Trump suggested that the decision was in part motivated by displeasure over what he described as Ottawa’s failure to pay the United States mob-style “protection” money for the privilege of existing under the American military umbrella.
open image in gallery“You know, we defend Canada for nothing. We don’t get anything. They don’t pay us to defend Canada, but we defend Canada, and they understand that. As an example, we bought icebreakers. They’d like to use them. We have 11 brand new icebreakers coming in, they’d like to use the icebreakers. They don’t pay for anything, and they want to be treated like a state, but they’re not a state,” he said.
He added that the “whole Canadian thing” has been “going on for decades” and “has to stop” while offering up the example of automobile manufacturing as something that he believes should be entirely re-shored to the U.S.
Asked why he was antagonizing one of America’s traditional allies even as he continues to cozy up to dictators in China and North Korea, Trump lashed out at leaders in Ottawa for pushing back against his trade war with retaliatory tariffs that they levied in response to the ones he ordered after trade talks broke down last week.
“The Canadian officials have treated us very badly — they’re nasty people,” he said.
Trump then suggested that Canada was “the worst to deal with on trade” despite the country’s long relationship with the U.S. and the trade agreement his administration negotiated during his first term.
He complained that Canadians “feel entitled” and added that “we can’t have that.”
open image in galleryTrump had teased the troll-ish renaming order in a video posted to TikTok earlier this week.
In the video, he displayed a map of the Great Lakes and suggested he would do exactly what he did on Thursday.
“We’re gonna make a little change; we’re gonna call it something different than Lake Ontario,” the 80-year-old president said. “We’re gonna call it Lake America. And all it takes is a good pen and some intelligence.”
Trump, a former real estate mogul with a penchant for branding, then used a Sharpie to cross out the lake’s name and write “LAKE AMERICA” above it.
His geographic broadside at America’s northern neighbor is the latest episode in a series of events that have fractured the relationship between the two countries.
According to The Globe and Mail, Canadian defense forces have begun modeling a response to a hypothetical U.S. invasion for the first time in more than a century.
Since taking office last January, Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to acquire Canada, which he described on multiple occasions as “the 51st state.” And in recent weeks, he’s reportedly turned his attention back to Canada, fixating on the country’s “vulnerability” to foreign adversaries in its Arctic reaches.
At the same time, the 80-year-old president has made clear his desire to take control of Greenland, a territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, another NATO ally. The White House, which says it needs Greenland for purposes of national security, sees several options to achieve this goal, including the use of military force.