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…
Page B1From§Eachthe milkman edition — 31 August 2026
Trump calls Canada's leaders the 'worst' of any country, then renames their shared lake after the US.
As it ran on the front
LAKE ONTARIO, U.S. cartographic listing, age approximately two hundred years by American usage, died this week at the hands of an executive order. Cause of death was a Google Maps update applied within United States borders, following the president's public remark that he did not want Canadian anything, and arriving the same week he called that country's leadership the worst he had dealt with, as a trade dispute between the two nations escalated.
The name was carried without incident through two centuries of atlases, weather reports, and shipping manifests. It survived the War of 1812, the Seaway Treaty, and every prior administration that found a shared body of water easier to leave alone than to rename. It is survived by Lake Erie, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, and Lake Superior, all still listed under their old names as of this writing, their futures not guaranteed. It is preceded in death by the working theory that a map is a description rather than a claim.…
…(cont) This reporter has sat with a lot of obituaries for a lot of small, quiet things - a filing deadline, a residency requirement, a rule nobody thought to defend until it was gone. Most of them die administratively, a line struck in a budget nobody reads. This one died louder, in the middle of a trade fight, on a body of water two countries have shared since before either map existed. That is not cartography. That is a flag planted on a lake that already has an owner on the other shore, and calling it malarkey undersells the paperwork involved.
A name does not need a funeral to matter. It needs someone to notice when it is replaced by an assertion. The lake did not move. The border did not move. Only the label changed, and only on one side of it, and only after the man who ordered it changed said out loud what he thought of the people on the other side.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that mourners open an atlas printed before this year and read the name out loud, once, to whoever is in the boat with them.
“You insult the neighbor at the fence, then you go paint your name on the water you share with him - that's not diplomacy, that's a landlord move. Watch what gets renamed next once the app updates again.”
“This is a routine cartography update, nothing political about it. Well, the order does cite the trade dispute by name, but that's - that's not the point I was making.”
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…
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…
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…
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."
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.