President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the United States is considering renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” as tensions with Canada escalate over trade.
Trump made the announcement in a Truth Social post Tuesday morning, tying the proposed name change directly to the deteriorating relationship between the United States and Canada.
“The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer,” Trump wrote.
The statement comes amid a renewed trade fight between the United States and Canada after negotiations broke down over the weekend.
Trump subsequently raised tariffs on about $20 billion in Canadian imports, while Canada is also preparing additional tariffs of its own.
Lake Ontario forms part of the international boundary between the United States and Canada and is bordered by New York on the south and Ontario on the north. The lake is closely tied to shipping, tourism, recreation and commerce across Upstate New York, including communities in the Rochester region and along the lake’s eastern shoreline.
Trump did not provide details about how a name change would be carried out, whether Canada would recognize it or whether federal agencies have begun a formal process to rename the lake.
The proposal follows a similar move involving the Gulf of Mexico.
Last year, Trump directed the federal government to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Google Maps later adopted the Gulf of America label for users in the United States.
Any attempt to rename Lake Ontario would likely carry additional complications because the lake is shared by two countries and its existing name is used internationally.
For now, Trump’s statement amounts to a proposal under consideration rather than a completed federal action.
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