President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday changing the federal government’s name for Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” escalating a symbolic dispute with Canada amid worsening trade tensions.
Trump signed the order in the Oval Office and said the change was effective immediately. A White House official said the order directs the U.S. Department of the Interior to update the federal Geographic Names Information System to reflect the new name.
“We’re going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario, effective immediately, to Lake America,” Trump said before signing the order.
The move follows Trump’s announcement earlier this week that his administration was considering the change because of deteriorating trade relations with Ontario and Canada.
During Thursday’s signing, Trump again tied the decision directly to Canada, accusing the country of unfair trade practices and saying the United States has carried too much of the economic and military burden in the relationship.
Trump said the lake’s new federal name was also intended to reflect what the administration described as its physical connection to the United States. A White House official said most of the lake’s volume and its deepest areas are within U.S. territory.
Lake Ontario is shared by the United States and Canada, with New York along its southern and eastern shores and the province of Ontario to the north and west.
The executive order changes how the U.S. federal government refers to the lake, but it does not establish that Canada or international bodies will adopt the same name.
Trump compared the move to his earlier decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America for federal purposes.
“We took something called the Gulf of Mexico, we changed it and now it’s very routinely the Gulf of America,” Trump said. “So if you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake.”
The president then joked that an ocean could be next, suggesting the Atlantic or Pacific could someday be considered for a name change.
Trump said the administration had completed the necessary federal paperwork and notifications associated with Thursday’s order.
The decision comes during a renewed trade confrontation with Canada. Trump said his administration plans substantial tariffs on Canadian automobiles and continued to argue that the United States should reduce its economic reliance on Canadian manufacturing.
The name change is likely to have an immediate effect on federal maps, databases, documents and agencies once the Interior Department carries out the order.
How quickly private mapping companies, publishers and other organizations adopt the new federal terminology remains unclear.
For communities across Upstate New York, the order places a new name on one of the region’s defining geographic features — at least as far as the U.S. government is concerned.
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