President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday afternoon to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” his latest escalation as he engages in a tense trade war with Canada.
“‘Lake of America’ was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” Trump said from the Oval Office. “We have a gulf and we have a lake. Now, all we need is an ocean. So, maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”
Surrounded by large maps of the Great Lakes, Trump said the name change was “effective immediately,” and that his staff had “filed all the necessary papers, documents, everything else.” A White House aide claimed the lake “has most of its volume in the United States” and that the “deepest parts” are in US territory.
Not completely unchanged. Someone briefly changed the name before other editors restored it and moved Lake America to the official_name:en-US tag. That’s been OSM’s way of not quite placating people insisting on the name change.