President Donald Trump was accused of naked gangsterism and revisionist history on Sunday when he announced that Venezuelan oil would be used to refill the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. "One of the things I am going to do with the…
Page A8From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 31 August 2026
Trump spurns 'Canadian anything,' claims Venezuelan oil instead; Google renames Lake Ontario 'Lake America.'
As it ran on the front
Follow the sequence, because the sequence is the whole story. First the President says, in so many words, that he does not want Canadian anything — not the lumber, not the energy, not the pleasantries. Then, in the same news cycle, he says Venezuelan oil is going to replenish the strategic reserve. Venezuela. The country under a sanctions regime this administration itself has tightened, run by a government this administration has called illegitimate, is now the preferred vendor for the barrels that used to come from the guy next door who says 'sorry' too much. Somewhere between those two sentences is the actual policy, and it isn't patriotism, and it isn't energy independence, it's just: whoever's in charge that week decides who gets to sell us oil, and the reasoning fits on a bumper sticker.
Then Google Maps quietly renames Lake Ontario 'Lake America.' Half that lake is Canadian water. It has been Canadian water since before there was a Google, since before there was a United States doing the renaming. Nobody voted on this. No treaty changed. A tech company's map layer just decided the border doesn't need labeling this week, and it happened to happen the same week the President was on record not wanting anything with the word 'Canadian' on it.…
…(cont) This is what the con looks like from the inside: it never announces itself as a con. It announces itself as a mood — a vibe about self-reliance, about not needing anybody — and then the mood gets fed into a map, into a reserve, into a supply contract, and by the time you notice, the lake has a new name and the oil has a new source and nobody had to pass a law to make either one true. You don't need legislation if you control the map and the pipeline and the news cycle that reports both without blinking.
The stakes here are not abstract. Energy policy set by grudge instead of contract is energy policy that can flip again next week, on the next grudge. A reserve that depends on the mood of one man is not a reserve. It's a mood with a barrel count.
“You spend years sanctioning Venezuela's oil like it's radioactive, then one week it's topping off the strategic reserve, while Canada — the actual ally — gets frozen out because he 'doesn't want Canadian anything.' Meanwhile Google quietly renames the lake. That's not policy, that's a mood, and moods make bad law.”
“The President is simply prioritizing American energy independence — Venezuela happens to have oil, Canada happens to have tariffs, that's just supply and demand, not, uh, not a foreign policy realignment toward a sanctioned regime. No, that's not what I— look, it's about barrels, not borders.”
The receipts
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…
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…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.