Alan Zendell, September 8, 2026

Donald Trump’s obsession with naming everything he can get away with after himself has now reached almost comical heights. My first reaction to hearing that he issued an Executive Order renaming Lake Ontario, Lake America was to laugh. My second was to ask how he imagines he has the right to do such a thing.

His thin legal justification is an 1890 law that gives American presidents the power to require federal agencies to use uniform names for places, bodies of water, even mountains, even though there is no federal agency that calls Lake Ontario by any other name. Thus Alaska’s Mount Denali, the tallest mountain in North America is once again Mount McKinley, consistent with Trump’s disdain for all nations whose people are predominantly non-white. (What we colloquially refer to as “Indian tribes” possess inherent sovereignty under two-hundred year old Supreme Court rulings and relate to the U. S. Government as sovereign-to-sovereign.)

Trump thinks he’s insulting Canada by attempting to change Lake Ontario to Lake America, but that too is a slur against native Americans. Its original name comes from the word Ontari’io which means beautiful lake in the language of the Iroquoi Nation. The Lake wasn’t named for the Canadian province; the province was named for the lake. Trump also thinks he’s insulting Canada by referring to its Prime Minister as “Governor Carney” as if Canada were nothing more than a fifty-first state, but Carney is a true statesman who doesn’t take Trump’s bait.

While American presidents can legally order maps altered in federal maps and documents, they have no authority over what other countries name things. I was on a cruise in the Caribbean in March 2025, shortly after Trump declared that the Gulf of Mexico was now the Gulf of America. When passengers noticed that maps displayed on the ship already read “Gulf of America” their typical reaction was shock and anger, at both Trump and Google, who immediately revised their map software to reflect Trump’s Executive Order, despite there being no legal requirement that private companies follow it. Apple has similarly revised its maps. I checked Google Maps this morning, and you’ll be relieved to know that the area between Arizona and Texas is still called “New Mexico.”

If you’re wondering whether there’s an rational basis for renaming Lake Ontario, Trump’s is based, of all things, on geometry, though I seriously doubt that the concepts of volume and surface area mean anything to him. He claims that since the deepest part of Lake Ontario is on the U. S. side of the border, more than half of the lake’s volume is American water, but one could as reasonably argue that since most of the lake’s surface area is on the Canadian side, it belongs to Canada.

This renaming nonsense apparently means more to Trump than any of the major debacles that resulted from his policies. As Trump himself said a few days ago, if he doesn’t establish a legacy of plastering his name on everything he can, no one else will after he’s gone. He said that seriously, as if it were a sound justification for his obsession, when the reality is that when Trump is gone, the great majority of Americans will try to forget he ever existed.

Trump’s approval ratings, which are at an all-time low, reflect Americans’ growing concern over the president’s priorities. As Kimberly Wehle wrote in The Hill, it’s interesting that after all his missteps, the attempt to rename Lake Ontario seems to have the greatest effect of turning the American public against him. Maybe that’s because it’s such an incredibly petty thing to do, even his supporters shake their heads wondering why he wastes his time on it, much less prioritizing it over things like his incompetent handling of the war in Iraq.

Ms Wehle noted that beyond the death and destruction caused by the war, with no noticeable progress toward its stated goal of assuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, Americans are more upset over Lake Ontario than they are over “the 66,000 people currently in immigration detention camps, over 70 percent of whom have no criminal convictions; the roughly 0.2 to 0.4-point rise in inflation due to Trump’s ongoing tariffs; his    astonishingly corrupt pay-to-play engagements with ultra-wealthy individuals, corporations, special interests, and foreign governments; his recent lowering of standards for FBI recruits to tolerate stealing, the hiring of sex workers, and even bestiality; the appearance of his name over 38,000 times in the Epstein files, which still have not been released in their entirety despite a congressional mandate; and the staggering wealth Trump and his unelected family members have accumulated since he retook office.”

I can’t explain why, but messing with Lake Ontario seems to have struck a nerve in most of us more than most of Trump’s other clownish antics did. It certainly did with me. I don’t understand it, but anything that makes people realize his power must be neutralized in November has to be a good thing.