President Donald Trump’s order turning Lake Ontario into “Lake America” detonated a cross-border political fight Thursday, with Democrats drafting a bill to block the change, Canadian leaders insisting the old name stays and state officials mocking the move online.
Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, plans to introduce the one-page “Hands Off Our Great Lakes Act” on Monday after documents obtained by Politico showed the bill would cancel Trump’s order and “restore the name of Lake Ontario.”
Dingell confirmed the draft Thursday evening on X and cast the lake fight as a threat to a waterway protected for generations by Americans and Canadians.
“The Great Lakes are a shared treasure that generations of Americans and Canadians have worked together to protect,” Dingell wrote. “That’s why I’m introducing legislation to keep Lake Ontario as Lake Ontario and block President Trump’s idiotic order.”
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney answered Trump by pointing to the name’s Indigenous origin and centuries of use.
EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY: Trump Tower is renamed to NATALIE TOWER! https://t.co/5wTAHjJzrX pic.twitter.com/jeWMSC8f4E
— JB Pritzker (@JBPritzker) August 27, 2026
“The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big,’” Carney said in a statement.
“The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.”
Carney said Canadians understood that America was changing its trading relationships, foreign policies, national monuments and “hydronyms,” but added that “naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario — then, now and always.”
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Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston had no interest in playing along either.
“We’re into some real foolishness now. It’s Lake Ontario, buddy,” Houston wrote.
Trump made the rename official after the chance of a Canada trade deal had collapsed less than a week earlier and after he announced a 50 percent tariff on Canadian autos and steel scheduled to start next year.
“We’re going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario effective immediately to Lake America. That’s going to take place right now as I sign the order,” Trump said.
🚨 BREAKING: @POTUS signs an Executive Order renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America.
Here is the text of the Order:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1. Purpose and Policy.… pic.twitter.com/ggfLXiD0g7
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) August 27, 2026
The executive order instructs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to change the lake’s listing in the Geographic Names Information Service.
The White House had already released video Tuesday of Trump taking a pen to a map, crossing out Lake Ontario and writing Lake America in its place.
Trump said there was “no message” for Canada in the rename, then used the signing to complain that the country has taken advantage of the United States on trade and defense.
“As you know, Canada has been ripping us off for a long time on trade, very sadly,” Trump remarked. “Even the military, you know, we defend Canada for nothing.”
The president said Canada wants to use 11 new U.S. icebreakers without paying and claimed the United States has been losing an average of $60 billion a year to Canada for 15 years.
“We love the people of Canada. I don’t think their representatives do an appropriate job,” Trump said. “Maybe they’ll change. I really don’t know. It doesn’t make much difference.”
Trump also tied Lake America to his earlier Gulf of Mexico name change, saying the lake had been on his mind for a long time.
“Actually, as you know, we took something called the Gulf of Mexico, we changed it, and now it’s very routinely the Gulf of America,” Trump said.
The president then suggested the Atlantic and Pacific could be next.
“So, maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and or the Pacific,” he said. “Maybe we’ll change them both.”
Democrats and even one Wisconsin Republican treated Trump’s map work as an opening for their own renaming bits.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers posted video of himself writing on a napkin and announced that he had “just renamed Lake Michigan Lake Wisconsin.”
“See, I can sign napkins that say things, too,” Evers wrote.
Rep. Tony Wied, a Wisconsin Republican, used the same Great Lake for his own joke, writing on X, “while we’re at it – Lake Wisconsin sounds good too.”
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker aimed at one of Trump’s buildings instead, saying he would “rename” Trump Tower as “Natalie Tower.”
The jab pointed to Natalie Harp, Trump’s 35-year-old “executive assistant,” after Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff said Trump did not want to do the job and instead wanted to “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul rejected the Lake America label outright.
“New York won’t be calling it that,” Hochul tweeted.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton kept her response shorter.
“It’s Lake Ontario,” Clinton wrote on X.
Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, said Trump “needs to read a book” and argued that the order showed he either misunderstood America’s place in the world or did not care about it.
“The number one job of a leader is to improve people’s lives,” Kelly said. “He said there in the Oval Office, he has spent a lot of time thinking about this. How does changing the name of a lake help the American people?”
Kelly said Trump spends time on “stupid things like the naming of lakes and gulfs” and on “trying to make himself richer.”
Dingell also used a Thursday press release to say Canada is “our neighbor, our ally, and one of Michigan’s most important economic partners.”
“It is a friendship that no stroke of a pen can erase,” Dingell said.
“When President Trump is done doing arts and crafts in the Oval, I’d suggest he turn his attention to his failed economy that is raising costs, eliminating jobs, and leaving working men and women behind,” she added.
