Trump Declares That Lake Ontario Is Now ‘Lake America’

Jackie Llanos and Jenna Monnin, reporting for NOTUS:

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.”

Aaron Rupar has video clips of Trump declaring the change in an Oval Office press event, here and here. In the second clip Trump ruminates, “So if you think about it, we have a gulf, and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean, so maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.” Those who deny that he’s a mad king slipping ever deeper into dementia might say, well, he’s obviously joking. But if I had told those same people just two years ago, in the run up to his reelection, that Trump was going to declare new names for the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, they’d have said I was crazy because that would be nutty.

It is nutty. Renaming these large bodies of water is nuts. He’s nuts. This is not complicated. Crazy people do crazy things and this is obviously crazy. I often use the phrase jokingly but Donald Trump is not hooked up right, and the proof is right before our eyes on camera every day.

Factoid: HOMES is the longstanding mnemonic for recalling the five Great Lake names: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. “Hames”, technically, is a playable Scrabble/Wordle word (“a part of a horse collar”), but it’s far too obscure to serve as a mnemonic. That leaves one word in the English language consisting of the five necessary letters: SHAME.

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