In a rush? Skip ahead to our favorite sections: ⏩ Context on Carney’s Tweets & ⏩Why Trump Actually Pulls Stunts Like “Gulf Of America” And “Lake America”
What Happened
This afternoon, in the Oval Office, Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.”
The order is called Honouring the American History of the Great Lakes and Renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America. He signed it flanked by oversized poster boards, one of them titled “Making the Great Lakes Even Greater,” with a gold “Lake America” label pasted over the lake.
He said it was effective immediately— unsurprisingly, it isn't. The order itself says something slightly different: the Secretary of the Interior has 30 days, working with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, to update the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) and “remove all references to Lake Ontario” from it.
The Board then has to issue guidance so that every federal map, contract, document and communication uses the new name.
So What’s In A Name?
The word ‘Ontario’ predates the colonization of this continent.
Lake Ontario isn’t named after the province; the province is named after the lake. And the lake’s name was taken from an Iroquoian word — it shows up in the written record in 1641, more than two centuries before Canada existed to adopt it.
![Lake Ontario isn’t named after the province. The province is named after the lake. And the lake’s name was taken from an Iroquoian word — it shows up in the written record in 1641, more than two centuries before Canada existed to adopt it. [Yahoo News headline: “‘You cannot rename away our history’: First Nation fires back at Trump’s ‘Lake America’ jab as Canada-U.S. tensions flare — The Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation says the debate over Trump’s “Lake America” proposal overlooks an Indigenous relationship with the waters that predates Canada and the U.S.”] But Chief Margaret Sault’s response, issued before Trump signed the order, anticipated precisely that possibility. “Lake Ontario has existed for thousands of years, long before Canada and the United States became the countries we know today,” Sault told Yahoo News Canada.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Fp6U!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F97cabbdc-c60a-4afc-8961-e540362d3c5f_1080x1350.png)
The word ‘Ontario’ predates the colonization of this continent
👆🏽The Critical Context for Consideration for this Tweet
First, this tweet by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is great — especially when compared to Donald Trump's chaos. It's completely factually accurate.
But here is some critical context to keep in mind as Mark Carney references the Iroquoian origins of the word Ontario.
Our Prime Minister has been quietly cutting funding to Indigenous files since taking office. Not to mention that Canada, like the United States, has historically failed and is currently failing to honour treaty rights with Indigenous peoples.
We are still stealing land, displacing communities, and violating Indigenous peoples’ basic human rights and freedoms — through pipeline routing, resource extraction, chronic underfunding of on-reserve water and child welfare, and the criminalization of land defenders — in a way we would never dream of doing to the people living on the Bridle Path in Toronto, or in wealthy, white neighbourhoods on either side of the colonial border that divides Lake Ontario.
So Why Would Trump Do This?
Trade talks between Canada and the U.S. collapsed last week. Over the weekend, 50% tariffs hit roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods. Canada matched them. Trump announced 50% tariffs on Canadian steel, autos and auto parts starting in January. Then he started posting about the lake. Asked what message he was sending Canada, he said there was no message but then — (??? 🤨) — said Canada has been ripping the U.S. off, adding, “they want to be treated like a state, but they’re not a state.”
Written in the EO itself is some nonsense about most of the lake’s water sitting on the American side. For the record: the border runs down the middle. About 52% of the surface is Canadian, 48% American, split under the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty. The EO’s own “we own most of the volume” claim leans on the fact that the deepest sections happen to sit on the U.S. side, which is a very specific way of measuring a lake to reach the answer you already wanted.
And remember — Lake Ontario isn’t named after the province of Ontario. So the whole premise is doing gymnastics that Trump himself couldn’t.
So, can an executive order by the President of the United States rename Lake Ontario?
An executive order by the U.S President tells U.S. federal agencies what to do. That’s it. Federal maps, government databases, official documents — those update. Everything outside the U.S. executive branch keeps calling it Lake Ontario, because a U.S. EO has no legal force in Canada, at the UN, or on international maps.
We know exactly how this plays out because Trump already did it. In January, he renamed the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America.” Mexico refused to recognize it. The UN didn’t.
Private companies get to choose what they want to do. For example Google labelled it “Gulf of America” for U.S. users, “Gulf of Mexico” for Mexicans, and “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” for everyone else. Apple did the same.
So what does the EO actually do? It changes what U.S. federal agencies call the lake. That’s it. It’s a symbolic act with a very small legal footprint — and a very large political one, which is the point.
Can an executive order by the President of the United States rename Lake Ontario?
🇨🇦 For Canada? No.
🇺🇳 Internationally? No.
🤑 For private companies? No.
🇺🇸 For US Federal Agencies? Yes.
Which begs the question: why the fresh f*ck would Trump waste time doing this?*
OCP DEFINES | ‘FLOOD THE ZONE’ TACTIC
Renaming a lake to score points in a trade war isn’t a policy. It’s a political tactic — and it has a name: Flood The Zone.
The term was coined by Steve Bannon — one of Trump’s closest advisors, widely credited as the architect of Trump’s 2016 rise. Bannon has boasted about this strategy on the record for years, telling reporters and repeating it on camera: the Democrats aren’t the opposition, the media is, and the way to handle the media is to “flood the zone with shit.”
The Core Tactic: The goal is to dominate news cycles, exhaust public attention, disorient opponents, and drown out critical or negative reports.
How It Works
Saturation. Produce so much news — statements, orders, posts, provocations — that no journalist, no opposition, no ordinary person can hold focus on any single thing long enough for it to land.
Disorientation. The goal isn’t to convince you the lake should be called Lake America. The goal is to exhaust you until you stop trying to sort out what’s true at all.
Misdirection. When a damaging story is building, introduce something new, weird, or absurd. The old liability doesn’t get resolved. It gets buried under the next thing.
The Receipts: In the first 100 days of this second term, Trump signed 140+ executive orders. Biden signed 162 across his entire term. That’s not a president with ideas to make life better for the 99%. That’s a strategy to hide the fact that he doesn’t.
um—HELLO?! If we know that this is a tactic why does the news still fall for it?
Steve Bannon has been openly praising the Flood the Zone strategy since at least 2018 — so why do news outlets continue to cover all of it? Money/late-stage capitalism.
Media Scholar, Victor Pickard argues that today, “The news media’s primary goal is not to distribute information to the public but to garner ratings and revenues.”
This has been echoed by actual CEO’s, including Les Moonves, CEO of CBS (includes CBS News), who said in 2016:
“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS […]The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”
⚠️ not all ‘news’ is created equally 🚨
Corporate media — CNN, MSNBC, Fox, CBS, ABC, NBC in the U.S., Bell, Rogers, Postmedia, Global in Canada — are for-profit businesses. They answer to shareholders and advertisers.
The people making coverage decisions aren’t journalists — they’re executives several rungs up. Journalists inside these newsrooms are workers, closer to a cashier at Loblaws than to Galen Weston type executives. Coverage is shaped by what generates revenue, not what serves the public.
What Might Be Buried Under Trump’s ‘Lake America’ ‘Flood’
• Trump’s approval rating hit 33% this week — a new second-term low, a 14-point slide.
• Consumer confidence fell again in August. Americans are more pessimistic about jobs and the economy.
• Midterms are ~70 days away and Republicans are nervous
• The U.S. reimposed a naval blockade on Iran. The Strait of Hormuz crisis pushed Brent crude past $126 a barrel — the IEA called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.
• His own tariffs are raising prices in a year when cost of living is the top voter concern.
• His administration is ending a Medicare Part D subsidy that will raise prescription drug premiums for millions of older adults in 2027.
• US continues to fund Israel’s crimes against humanity
Psst: Two things can be true at once: it’s a spiteful, petty action by Trump, AND it’s designed to distract.
