Donald Trump wants to change the name of “Lake Ontario” to Lake America. But history shows that he’s going to fail.
Before Canada or the United States existed, this region was a massive, thriving geopolitical trade hub. On the south shore, in modern Upstate New York, lived the powerful Haudenosaunee Confederacy, including the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. On the north shore lived the Wyandot, also known as the Huron.
The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big.” The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. For centuries, that name belonged to the water and the people who protected it.
But then came the colonizers. And Donald Trump is not the first politician driven by ego to try and stick his own brand on this water. In 1632, French explorer Samuel de Champlain renamed it “Lac de St. Louis.” Later, in 1712, French officials tried to rename it “Lac Frontenac.” But they failed.
Because you can’t erase hundreds of years of deep cultural geography with an orange crayon, which seems to be Trump’s favorite writing instrument these days. Back then, the world ignored the French kings, the local people kept using the original name, and by the 1660s, European maps were forced to switch back to a Latinized version of the native root: Lake Ontario.
Trump’s mandate only forces U.S. federal agencies to print the new name. Canada still owns its side of the lakebed. Canadians and the rest of the world will call it Lake Ontario “now and forever.”
But there is a bigger lesson here about Trump’s obsession with branding. History shows us that name changes imposed from above and driven by ego don’t stick. In fact, almost everything Trump has ever plastered his name on eventually gets scrubbed away.
Think about his bankrupt casinos, his failed airline, or the luxury condo boards across New York and Chicago that voted to rip the “T-R-U-M-P” letters off their facades. Just like his attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” last year, “Lake America” is a temporary political stunt.
When Trump is gone, the executive orders will be overturned. The gold will be removed. If he does get his name on the Kennedy Center, it will just get ripped off as soon as he’s gone. Everything he’s tried to put his name on while he was president will be erased.
History will not be kind to Donald Trump.
And the lake? It will still be Ontarí’io. The lake is beautiful, the lake is big.
