Lake America: Trump, Carney and the French Translation
Lake America: Trump, Carney and the French Translation
On August 27, 2026, something that had sounded like one of President Donald Trump’s provocative suggestions became an official act of the United States government.
Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”
The order instructs the Secretary of the Interior, working with the Board on Geographic Names, to take action within 30 days to change the name in the Geographic Names Information System. Federal maps, contracts, documents and government communications are to reflect the new designation.
Canada, of course, is not required to follow an American executive order. That distinction is central to both the international dispute and the political cartoon I drew about it.
Why Trump Renamed Lake Ontario
The executive order is considerably more detailed than the name alone suggests.
The White House argues that the United States has played an exceptional role in protecting and maintaining the Great Lakes. The order points out that the U.S. Coast Guard provides nine of the 11 icebreaking vessels operating on the Great Lakes and cites nearly $4 billion in American investment in protecting the freshwater ecosystem over the previous decade.
It also makes a geographical argument.
According to the order, the deepest portions of Lake Ontario lie within U.S. territory, giving the United States what the administration describes as most of the lake’s volume. The document reaches further back into history, invoking American settlement, commerce, Oswego, Sackets Harbor, the War of 1812 and the lake’s role in connecting the American interior to eastern markets and the Atlantic.
The administration therefore presents Lake America not simply as a taunt directed toward Canada but as an assertion of American history and investment in the Great Lakes.
The Canadians see things rather differently.
Lake America Arrives During a U.S.–Canada Trade War
The timing matters.
The renaming did not occur during an ordinary period in U.S.–Canada relations. It came amid a serious deterioration in trade relations between the neighboring countries.
The United States imposed 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods after trade negotiations collapsed. Canada subsequently announced retaliatory tariffs on a comparable value of American products, scheduled to take effect September 8.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has framed the dispute in terms extending beyond tariffs. He has argued that Canada must defend its economic independence and sovereignty against demands from Washington that his government considers excessive.
That makes changing the name of a lake shared by the two countries particularly provocative.
The American government can change what its own agencies call the lake. It cannot order Canadians to stop calling it Lake Ontario.
And Canadian leaders have made clear that they have no intention of doing so. AP reported that Canadian officials rejected the new designation while emphasizing the lake’s history and Canadian significance.
Then There Was the French-Language Dispute
There was another, stranger ingredient in the U.S.–Canada negotiations that caught my attention as a cartoonist: French.
Canada’s French-language policies had become one of the contentious questions surrounding the failed negotiations.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer subsequently clarified that Canada’s French-language requirements were not a U.S. “red line.”
Dominic LeBlanc, the Canadian minister responsible for U.S. trade, welcomed that clarification. Reuters reported that the concerns had involved Canadian measures promoting French, including issues involving labeling and the discoverability of French-language content.
In diplomatic language, a “red line” is essentially a point on which one side is unwilling to compromise.
In other words, the United States was indicating that Canada’s promotion of French was not, by itself, something that had to prevent an eventual trade agreement.
And almost simultaneously, Trump was putting a new American name on Lake Ontario.
That collision of stories gave me the cartoon.
English: Lake America. French: Lake America.
In my drawing, Trump stands in the foreground displaying his newly signed executive order.
Behind him are Carney and LeBlanc.
Trump’s folder provides what might be called the administration’s bilingual translation:
ENGLISH: LAKE AMERICA
FRENCH: LAKE AMERICA
Nothing changes.
Carney looks over Trump’s shoulder and manages a relatively restrained:
“Mon Dieu!”
LeBlanc offers:
“Tabarnak!”
The latter is a considerably stronger Canadian-French exclamation, derived from the Catholic word tabernacle and belonging to the distinctive tradition of Québécois profanity known as sacres.
The joke isn’t that Trump ordered Canadians to use the English name. He didn’t.
The joke is precisely the opposite.
The American government can officially call the water Lake America, while the Canadians on the opposite shore can continue looking at precisely the same lake and calling it Lake Ontario.
The two names now say something about the governments using them.
A Name Becomes a Political Object
That is what interested me most about this story.
Tariffs are percentages. Trade regulations fill hundreds of pages. Arguments about labeling, language requirements and market access can become nearly invisible to anyone outside the negotiations.
A name is different.
Put LAKE AMERICA on a map and suddenly the argument becomes visible.
The White House executive order itself treats geography as an expression of national memory. It explicitly connects the change with Trump’s earlier policy of naming significant natural landmarks in ways the administration believes honor American history and achievement.
Critics see the same act as unnecessarily provocative toward a longtime ally. AP characterized the order as another escalation in an already bitter trade conflict, while Canadian leaders rejected Washington’s new terminology.
That disagreement is larger than cartography.
Who gets to name a shared place?
What does a government mean when it places its national identity onto geography?
And what happens when the people on the opposite shore simply refuse the name?
Those questions are what make Lake America such unusually rich material for political satire.
The executive order may change federal American maps.
It cannot make the Canadian reaction disappear.
And, apparently, it cannot improve the French translation.
Collect the Lake America Political Cartoon
My original Lake America political cartoon is available as a 36 × 24 acrylic gallery print, reproducing the caricatures, bilingual executive-order joke and details of the original artwork at a substantial wall-art scale.
SHOP THE PRINT
Lake America Acrylic Print Political Trump Art Canada 2026
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