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Desperate to appear strong, Trump shows pathetic weakness
Renaming stuff isn’t the flex he thinks it is.
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Remember “Sharpiegate,” a relatively inconsequential but uncommonly stupid episode from Trump’s first term?
The Sharpie is back.
In the surrealist performance hall that is the Oval Office, Trump grabbed his pen, took out a map of the Great Lakes, crossed out “Lake Ontario” and wrote in “Lake America,” part of a pointless new trade war he has started with Canada.
“Lake Ontario, that’s gone. Lake America,” he said. “So now we have a lake and now we have a Gulf because we have the Gulf of America and now we have Lake America.”
Stirring words.
Like so much of what Trump does, this was meant to be a show of strength. Yet it actually demonstrated just the opposite: Trump is weak and getting weaker.
He can instruct the federal government to change its maps, as he did with an executive order late last week, and will even find that many people will submit to his desires.
As of this writing, Google Maps has changed Lake Ontario to Lake America for those searching in the US, while Apple Maps has yet to do so — though since Apple Maps did change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America on Trump’s instruction, it may fall in line soon. (MapQuest loudly refused to make the change, in what may be a bid to inform people that it still exists.)
But if there are any voters in America who are impressed by Trump’s lacustrine nomenclature revisionism, they will surely be hard to find.
Instead, the “Lake America” inanity will be slotted alongside Trump’s ballroom, his quest to keep his name on the Kennedy Center, his helipad, and his Reflecting Pool faceplant. These are the things a failing, frustrated president does in a desperate bid to look strong, because he hasn’t been able to accomplish much of anything that might improve Americans’ lives.
A misbegotten trade war, on top of everything else
The attempted renaming of Lake Ontario was a petulant way to lash out at Canada over the latest episode in the trade war he started not long after taking office in 2025.
Despite a long and mutually fruitful trading relationship — including the US-Mexico-Canada-Agreement, a free trade pact Trump himself signed in his first term — he recently decided to impose yet another round of tariffs on Canadian goods. Among the demands the administration made to settle the dispute were that the US would get to dictate Canadian trade policy with third countries, so if the US imposed tariffs on another country’s goods, Canada would have been obligated to do the same.
