The Trouble With Trump’s Attempt to Rename Lake Ontario

 https://time.com/article/2026/08/28/the-trouble-with-trump-s-attempt-to-rename-lake-ontario/

As two geographers who have spent decades studying political toponymy, or the politics of place naming, in both the United States and Canada, we are dismayed by the careless nature of Trump’s impulsive use of place renaming as a form of political rage baiting. 

Renaming Lake Ontario is part of a larger pattern of using place naming to promote the Trump brand and his “America First” ideology. From the very outset of his second presidential term, Trump launched the so-called “Golden Age of America” by announcing that the Gulf of Mexico would be renamed the “Gulf of America.” This has now been followed with “Lake America,” and Trump even mused about possibly renaming the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, we presume to something along the lines of “American Ocean” or “Ocean of America.”

Over the past year, Trump’s obsession with naming places has given rise to a new term—toponymic narcissism—which refers to the condition of being obsessed with naming places after oneself.