A Reuters/Ipsos poll shows 63% of Americans oppose Trump's executive order renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America amid the U.S.-Canada trade war.
Page A3From§Eachthe noon edition — 1 September 2026
Trump orders Apple to rename Lake Ontario; most Americans polled say no.
As it ran on the front
Let's be clear about what actually happened here, because the coverage has gotten this backwards. The President asked Apple to update the name of Lake Ontario, a routine request any administration might make when it feels a body of water's name no longer reflects — reflects what, exactly, is a question for the cartographers, not for this column, and this column is not going to speculate about geography policy it wasn't briefed on.
What we do know is that a majority of Americans, per the polling, reject the renaming. That is fine. That is democracy working exactly as intended, which is to say the polling can say whatever it says and the request to Apple still goes out regardless, because — did I just say the poll doesn't matter? That's not what I meant. What I meant is the poll matters enormously, it's just that it arrived after the request, which is a timing issue, not a substance issue, and this administration tends to restate timing issues as substance issues.…
…(cont) Consider the alternative framing, which the critics conveniently ignore: a private company changing a map at a president's request is not an official government act, it's a suggestion, a friendly ask between a head of state and a trillion-dollar mapping vendor, and if Apple complies that's Apple's decision entirely, nothing to do with — well, it has something to do with the office making the ask, obviously, that's sort of the whole premise, I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
The deeper point, and I want to land this cleanly: renaming a Great Lake is a small, symbolic, low-cost gesture, and low-cost gestures are exactly what you'd expect from an administration focused on high-cost problems elsewhere, which is either reassuring or the opposite of reassuring depending on which gap you're measuring, and I've now talked myself into the exact framing I was trying to avoid, so let's just say: the polling is noted, the request stands, and Apple's engineering team is, at last report, the only branch of this operation currently working on it.
“This is what they spend the phone call on — getting a tech company to rewrite a map nobody asked to have rewritten, while the public, when actually asked, says no thanks. It's not policy, it's a vanity project routed through Cupertino, and it tells you exactly how much bandwidth is left over for anything that costs money instead of a phone call.”
“The President is exercising a legitimate interest in accurate cartography, and frankly the polling on any given Tuesday doesn't capture the full picture. Most Americans reject it, sure, but that's because the poll ran before people saw the map — wait, no, the poll was about the map. Okay, most Americans have seen it and still said no, that's a different point than the one I was making.”
The receipts
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said that President Trump has asked tech company Apple to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” after an executive order from the president that pushed the name change. “I know that the president reached out to Apple directly, so I’m sure that we may be seeing that change...
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.