The name change came after recent trade talks with Canada collapsed.
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Aug. 27 to officially rename Lake Ontario as Lake America, effective immediately.
“Canada has been ripping us off for a long time on trade, very sadly,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office after signing the order. “Even the military, you know, we defend Canada for nothing. We don’t get anything.”
He added that Canada wants to be treated like a state, but it’s “not a state.”
The U.S. Department of the Interior will update the Geographic Names Information System to reflect the new name.
“Make the Great Lakes Great Again!” wrote U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum after issuing an order to his department to implement the change.
The U.S. president issued the executive order as tensions between the two countries continue to escalate over tariffs and trade.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a statement on Aug. 27 that the lake’s historic name is Lake Ontario and that it will remain the same “then, now and always.”
He said the lake was named after the Wendat word “Ontari’io,” which means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big.”
“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,” he said. “We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.”
Trump first suggested the idea of renaming the lake on Aug. 25 after Ontario Premier Doug Ford criticized him with insults and profane language over the new U.S. tariffs on Canada on Aug. 24. Trump subsequently issued statements of his own with insults directed at Ford.
When asked about the issue, Ford said on Aug. 25 that it’s best that the two sides tone down the rhetoric, noting, “[Things] got a little personal yesterday between the president and myself.”
This is not the first time Trump has renamed a body of water. In January 2025, on his first day in office, he issued an executive order for all U.S. agencies to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
“We have a gulf, and we have a lake—now all we need is an ocean,” Trump said on Aug. 27. “Maybe we‘ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”
By Emel Akan and Omid Ghoreishi
