President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday meant to lend official weight to his plan to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” one day after a TikTok video appeared in which he crossed out the Great Lake’s name on a map by hand with a Sharpie. The clip went up Wednesday on the president’s TikTok account with the caption “LAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
In it, the 80-year-old president sits in the Oval Office and holds up a map of the lake, whose shoreline the United States and Canada share. Audio on the post is listed as “original sound – President Donald J Trump.”
A Map, a Marker and a Caption
Trump opened by noting that the lake sits in both countries, then announced his edit. “We’re gonna make a little change; we’re gonna call it something different than Lake Ontario,” Trump said in the clip, suggesting the task required nothing more than a decent pen and a bit of brains.
He then crossed out the existing name and wrote “LAKE AMERICA” above it, declaring that Lake Ontario was gone, according to the video. The United States, he continued, now had both a lake and a gulf bearing America’s name — a reference to the executive order he signed on the first day of his second term seeking to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, an effort that also drew ridicule.
The video followed a public trial balloon. Writing on Truth Social on Tuesday, Trump said the name change was under serious consideration, since he anticipated little business being done with Ontario in the future.
The Trade War Behind the Stunt
The map stunt came as relations between Washington and Ottawa deteriorated rapidly. On Saturday, after last-minute talks collapsed, the United States imposed 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion in Canadian goods. Prime Minister Mark Carney described the move as an act of war and responded with retaliatory duties reaching 50 percent.
The dispute has since turned personal. On Truth Social, Trump mocked Ontario Premier Doug Ford as a bloviating lackey who ought to get in line. Ford responded by calling the president a dictator and the king of bankruptcies, and telling him to kiss his backside.
The grievances go beyond the lake. Trump has already warned of retaliation of some kind over wildfire smoke drifting south from Canada, and he has sparred with Canadian officials about sharing revenue or ownership of a new international bridge between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit — a span Canada financed in full.
Real money rides on the playground insults. The tariffs and countermeasures are expected to raise prices on certain goods on both sides of the border, even while the White House argues its case in half-minute social media clips and escalating tensions online.
What a Renaming Would Actually Do
Changing the name of a shared body of water requires far more than a marker and a steady hand. The Board on Geographic Names, a government agency, sets how federal agencies use geographic names. Yet even approval there would not bind any other nation — Canadian maps, Canadian textbooks and Canadian weather forecasts could go on unchanged.
The Gulf of America order encountered the same limitation.
Trump’s Long-Running Sharpie Habit
The choice of tool was no surprise. Trump is a Sharpie loyalist — the marker is sold by a U.S.-based company owned by Newell Brands — and he pulls one out at formal and casual occasions alike.
During a Cabinet meeting in March, the president riffed at length about the pens, waving an all-black one and calling it inexpensive but effective. He recounted paying $1,000 for pens in the past before, he said, phoning the head of Sharpie to have custom all-black markers made for the White House at roughly $5 each. The results, he said, were “hot as a pistol,” and he said the company treats him well. A spokesperson for Newell Brands said the company had no information about the call Trump described.
Nor is it the first map a Trump Sharpie has altered. In September 2019, during his first term, he used one to change a weather chart showing the forecast track of Hurricane Dorian, a story that dominated coverage for days.
This time the subject is a 7,300-square-mile lake shared with a neighbor and longtime ally whose prime minister has already compared the administration’s tariffs to war. Whether “Lake America” ever turns up on a federal map remains an open question. What is clear is that the video, the executive order and the tariffs now belong to the same escalating quarrel, and neither capital looks ready to blink.