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…
Page A9From§Eachthe midnight edition — 31 August 2026
Trump says he doesn't want 'Canadian anything'; Google renames the U.S.-Canada border lake 'Lake America'
As it ran on the front
Here's the trick, and it's not even a good trick, it's just a trick nobody's hiding. The President says, on the record, 'I don't want Canadian anything.' Fine, that's a sentence. Then Google Maps — a private company, a for-profit map — goes and renames Lake Ontario, a lake this country shares, physically, with Canada, half the shoreline, 'Lake America.' Not a proposal. Not a debate. It just changes on your phone.
That's the con. You don't need a law when the map does it for you. Nobody voted on what the lake is called. Nobody on the Canadian side got a call. One executive order later and the water itself has been re-branded, and the branding happens to line up exactly with a guy who said out loud he doesn't want anything with the word Canadian on it.…
…(cont) It's Common Dreams calling it embarrassing, and they're right, but embarrassing undersells it — it's a company deciding that geography is a customer-service issue. You want the lake renamed? Sure, boss. Done by Tuesday. That's not patriotism, that's a vendor keeping an account happy, and the account happens to run the government that regulates the vendor. Follow that line far enough and it stops being about a lake.
This is the same move every time: pick something shared, something that was never anybody's exclusively — a lake, a strait, a border — and put a flag on it, and the institutions that are supposed to just report the facts, the map, the outlet, the search bar, go along, because going along costs them nothing and going against him costs a fight they don't need.
The stakes here aren't the lake. Nobody's drinking water changes. What changes is the habit — that when the man in charge says 'I don't want Canadian anything,' the private companies that run the infrastructure of daily life treat that as an instruction rather than a preference. That's the part that should bother you, not the name on the water.
“A private company just renamed a lake two countries share because one guy in Washington said he doesn't want anything 'Canadian.' Nobody voted, the water didn't move, but the map did — that's the con, compliance dressed up as branding.”
“This is simply a naming update reflecting current geographic labeling guidance, not a political statement — the company updates map labels routinely. Did I call an executive order 'routine'? That's not usually how this desk describes those.”
The receipts
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…
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…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.