Donald Trump has claimed he is considering renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America” as the trade war with Canada escalates.
Lake Ontario lays on the border between the two countries, with New York state on one side and Toronto, the capital of Canada’s Ontario province, on the other.
“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 said on his Truth Social platform.
This is not the first time Trump has attempted a nationalistic renaming of a geographical feature. In January 2025 Trump issued an executive order to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.
Mexico argued the US cannot legally change the Gulf’s name because the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea dictates that an individual country’s sovereign territory only extends up to 12 nautical miles out from the coastline.
