Google announced that it had begun rolling out changes to how its maps display Lake Ontario's name, after President Trump signed an executive order changing it to "Lake America."
Page B1From§Eachthe early evening edition — 30 August 2026
Trump orders Lake Ontario renamed 'Lake America' days after declaring he wants 'nothing Canadian'
As it ran on the front
Lake Ontario, a name, born sometime in the colonial surveys of the 1700s and used without complaint by cartographers, fishermen, and two nations for roughly three centuries, died this month at the direction of an executive order. It was renamed 'Lake America' on digital maps distributed by Google, per reporting from three separate outlets tracking the change as it rolled out. It was preceded in death by 'anything Canadian,' which the President said this week he does not want, and by the trade relationship with Canada, which the President separately described as the 'worst' he has dealt with of any country, as the trade war between the two nations continued to escalate.
The name is survived by the lake itself, which did not move, and by the Canadian half of its shoreline, which was not consulted and does not appear to have been renamed on the other side of the border. It is also survived by Lake Erie, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, and Lake Superior, none of which have yet received the treatment, though the order that renamed Ontario did not specify why one lake among five was selected first, or whether the others are next.…
…(cont) There will be no service. There rarely is, for a name. Names go the way most institutional things go now: not with legislation, not with a vote, but with an order signed in one building and executed by a mapping company in another, and by the time anyone official is asked about it, the thing is already gone and the answer is that it was always going to happen eventually.
Whippersnapper cartographers may object that a body of water shared by two countries for the length of recorded settlement does not become the exclusive property of one of them by federal order and a software update. That is, respectfully, malarkey. It happened. It is on the map now. Try finding the old name on a phone.
The deceased is also survived by roughly two hundred years of surveyors, treaty negotiators, and shipping manifests who worked under the old name and are no longer available for comment, on account of being dead themselves, the ordinary way, which this obituary is not about.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that mourners check what else got renamed while they were looking at the lake.
“You believe you can just rename what your neighbor helped fill for two hundred years, apparently you can. It's not a lake anymore, it's a real estate listing with a flag on it. Watch what else gets relabeled once the neighbors stop returning the calls.”
“The administration is simply standardizing map labels for American users, this is a Google product update, not a foreign policy statement. Look, the executive order did direct the change, so — it's both, I suppose. It's a naming convention. A naming convention with an executive order behind it, that's all it is.”
The receipts
President Donald Trump further ripped into Canada as the U.S. trade war with the country escalates, trashing its leadership as the “worst” of all countries he’s dealt with. While Trump’s insults against Canada are nothing new, his…
Google updated its Maps application on Sunday in adherence with an executive order President Donald Trump signed on Thursday that renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America. Titled, “Honoring the American history of the Great Lakes and renaming…
President Trump said Sunday he does not want U.S. businesses to import Canadian goods amid continued tariff tensions between the two countries. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said his tariffs “revived, and indeed saved” the American…
Tech giant Google faced widespread criticism over the weekend for becoming the first major online map provider to change the name of "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" for its US users, after President Donald Trump ordered the name change in…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.