Fox News host Trey Gowdy has landed on an objection to President Donald Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario that almost nobody saw coming: the acronym. Gowdy, a lawyer and former Republican representative from South Carolina, told viewers of “The Five” on Thursday that swapping “Ontario” for “America” would push the familiar Great Lakes memory aid uncomfortably close, in his view, to the name Hamas.
The militant group, that is.
Schoolchildren have long leaned on HOMES — Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior — to recall the five Great Lakes. Gowdy said it had taken him 12 years to commit the mnemonic to memory, and he sounded less than pleased at the idea of anyone altering it now.
A Mnemonic Problem on ‘The Five’
With the president’s new name, the “O” in that memory aid becomes an “A” — and that, Gowdy told the panel, is where his hesitation starts.
“The ‘O’ changes to ‘A.’ That’s close to ‘HAMAS,'” Gowdy said.
The revised acronym, he went on, stood to confuse a lot of children.
“That’s why I haven’t made up my mind on it yet,” he added.
Whether Gowdy was voicing a real reservation or simply needling the president’s latest cartographic venture, he left for viewers to judge. The logic was odd enough, though, that one co-host jumped in.
During the segment, co-host Jessica Tarlov pushed back on Gowdy’s claim. The exchange soon traveled well beyond the studio, ricocheting across social media and international news coverage and turning an obscure argument about a memory aid into one of the renaming saga’s most discussed moments.
How the Renaming Unfolded
The map dispute behind Gowdy’s deliberation unfolded in three stages. The president began by announcing on social media that he intended to rebrand Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” Next came a TikTok video in which he took a pen to a map, writing the new label across the lake by hand. Last, he signed an executive order that made the change official.
The order arrived as the president’s trade war with Canada escalated, a tariff-driven fight that has frayed ties between the two neighbors. And Lake Ontario is not solely American — Canada owns its northern shoreline, a geographic fact that lent the renaming a pointed edge.
This was not the first time Trump has moved to rewrite the names of North American waters. On Inauguration Day, he signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Roughly 19 months later came the Lake Ontario decree.
Mockery Floods the Internet
Reaction to the Lake Ontario order was immediate and unsparing. Social feeds filled with jokes about both the executive order and the hand-drawn TikTok that preceded it. Others skipped the commentary altogether and renamed the lake themselves, offering alternatives that ran from the ridiculous to the sharply political.
Gowdy added a fresh twist to the pile-on. Instead of arguing over sovereignty, diplomacy or the logistical chore of revising maps, charts and textbooks, the Fox News panel ended up debating whether HOMES-turned-HAMES sounds close enough to a foreign militant organization to trouble fourth graders.
The clip spread quickly. Outlets abroad picked up the segment and ran it under a “Lake Hamas” banner that cast Canada as the party getting the last laugh. What began as a trade-war jab has become an unexpected political and internet sensation, powered less by the order itself than by the increasingly strange arguments being made about it on cable television.
What Comes Next for the Lake
Renaming a body of water by executive order changes what the federal government calls it. It does not oblige Canada, international mapmakers or the rest of the world to follow suit — a limitation that also applied to the Gulf of America order, which drew resistance and ridicule of its own.
For now, the practical effect of the Lake Ontario order remains a matter of how widely the new label is adopted. The rhetorical effect is already clear: a president trading blows with Canada over tariffs has found a way to keep the dispute in the headlines without touching a single tariff schedule.
And somewhere in South Carolina, a former congressman is still weighing whether five lakes are worth a rewritten acronym.