Trump's Lake Ontario Renaming Stunt Highlights Absurdity Amid Crises

What are we even doing anymore?

That’s the question on the minds of Democrats, Republicans, independents, Americans and pretty much the entire world right now. President Donald Trump thought it was the best use of his time Thursday continuing his trade war with Canada by signing an executive order in front of TV cameras to “officially” rename Lake Ontario as Lake America.

“We have a gulf, and we have a lake. Now all we need is an ocean. So maybe we'll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific,” he told reporters.

Trump can force the federal government to start renaming various bodies of water around the world until every river is a Trump River, every lake is a Lake America, and every ocean is the Big Beautiful Reflecting Sea. America’s allies and enemies alike will continue using the old names as their opinions of not just the Trump administration but the institutions it represents continue to shift towards overt mockery. Trump’s personal approval rating, now around 33 percent, will keep dropping like a rock.

But if only the approval rating was the only issue on Trump’s plate. Americans struggle to afford groceries, the war in Iran continues despite the U.S. “totally destroying” the Middle East nation’s military, the midterm elections are likely to be heavily against the Republicans.

None of that is the most important, though – it's a symbolic renaming that had to come first.

Republicans, desperate for a positive message to carry as a banner through the midterms, have to be watching today’s events in disbelief.

As the president sat next to a surreal graphic once again claiming that Lake Ontario would be creatively redubbed “Lake America”, he sparred with reporters, claimed the Iran war would go on seemingly in perpetuity, and then asserted he’d change the name of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

His message, unfocused on anything other than personal beefs, comes as Republicans are just a matter of weeks away from facing the voters. Members of the president’s party have been growing more and more public with their anxieties for weeks, worried about the effects of the Iran war, higher consumer prices and the lack of a unifying Republican message. Gas prices remain stubbornly above a $4 per gallon average nationwide and the administration is facing backlash from ranchers as officials pause beef tariffs to deal with surging costs at the grocery checkout line.

With economic issues still at the top of voters’ minds, Trump continues to bat away concerns about persistently high gas prices, food costs and other issues while reports of his family’s own stunning profiteering continue to pour in.

But Thursday’s spectacle pushed the bounds of absurdity, even for Trump 2.0.

It raised the question entirely of what kind of news value it serves for the same set of White House reporters to spar with the president on-camera every day, rarely making serious news, while giving the president a boosted platform to deliver a daily rant to the eyes of millions of Americans. This is essentially provoking a newer version of the same debate that broadcast news outlets had in 2016 and in the aftermath of Trump’s first rise to power, when many Democrats and media critics alike faulted MSNBC, Fox and CNN for airing Trump’s hours-long rallies in full. Often without live or adequate fact-checking and at the expense of other candidates’ airtime.

Those networks are more selective now, but the impulse to put the president in front of the cameras remains, especially when he issues one of his typically rude comments to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins or another female journalist.

It should go without saying that any coverage of today’s events should note, for accuracy’s sake, that Canada has vowed to never recognize a U.S. effort to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America” and the odds of European or Asian countries ever entertaining similar notions for the Atlantic or Pacific are laughably low.

But it also has to be said that this is a truly inexplicable use of the president’s and the entire White House’s time.

Canadian officials have signaled this week that they are prepared to wait out the midterms and even potentially the end of Trump’s presidency as they see little hope for a resolution to the redeclared trade war.

Thursday drove that point home: Like his conflict in Iran, the president appears utterly uninterested in dealmaking or negotiation — the very foundations of his political brand, as he has instead adopted his “maximum pressure” strategy in every avenue of business.

What was once his plan for keeping Iran and North Korea in line is now the same tactic being deployed against Canada and the U.S.’s European allies.

All of this feels like it’s coming to an end — the midterms aren’t for another nine and a half weeks, but there was a distinctly lame duck vibe in Washington on Thursday. What comes next is anyone’s guess, however. If the Trump administration doesn’t find a way out of the swamp of foreign entanglements Trump has navigated into, the first task of his replacement could be America’s extraction.

If that sounds familiar, it should — dealing with the chaotic pullout from Afghanistan ordered by Trump after he lost the 2020 election cost Joe Biden a massive amount of political capital as more than a dozen Americans were killed and horrific scenes of panic and desperation played out at Kabul’s airport during the final troop withdrawal.

The reality of foreign conflicts like the war with Iran and Trump’s new trade war in Canada is that they can begin in an instant but take much, much longer to resolve. And that’s only prolonged if the man in charge sees no option but escalation and opts for few strategies beyond irritation and intimidation.