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There's an actual Trump Lake in Canada that people want renamed after Obama

Jack Landau
Jack Landau
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Aug 28 2026, 3:49 pm
There's an actual Trump Lake in Canada that people want renamed after Obama
Perry4761/Reddit | ZB Photos/Shutterstock

Donald Trump’s Lake Ontario crashout took an unsurprising turn on Thursday, when the U.S. president signed an executive order to rename the body of water straddling international lines to “Lake America.”

Despite the move’s undertones of a veiled threat to Canadian sovereignty, Trump’s executive order has been met with ridicule north of the border, and seems only to be strengthening Canadian resolve in a rapidly escalating cross-border trade war.

Prime Minister Mark Carney rebuffed Trump’s executive order hours later in a social media statement, explaining the name’s origins and stressing that its use even predates the United States as a country.

“Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always,” said Carney.

But some are taking things a bit further.

One Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., law firm is generating attention on social media, where they pointed out that there is a Northern Ontario body of water known as Trump Lake, noting that Canada has the opportunity to do the funniest thing in retaliation for the U.S. president’s petty revenge over a, frankly, hilarious war of words with Premier Doug Ford.

Broadbent Law wrote, “Trump issued a meaningless order renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America. In Northern Ontario we have what is currently named Trump Lake,” adding their own renaming suggestions like “Little Dictator Lake,” “Crooked Lake,” “Felon Lake,” “Ego Lake,” and “Grifter Lake.”

The firm also asked for public suggestions, and many Ontario residents chimed in with ideas, including a few who suggested naming it after 44th U.S. president and longtime Trump rival Barack Obama.

“Never as good as Obama lake,” said one commenter, adding, “Seriously though we should start a petition and change it. It would be a blow to his ego… and that would make me smile.”

There is indeed a petition to rename Ontario’s Trump Lake, though the organizer has gone with the suggestion of renaming it to “Lake Release the Files,” in reference to Donald Trump’s alleged involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

It’s not the only lake in Ontario that people have suggested we revenge-name for Barack Obama. A few people have also floated the name as a candidate for other Great Lakes on social media.

MapQuest even created an app that lets anyone rename Lake Ontario whatever the heck they want, and Obama’s name came up a few times.

Tim Naftali, a senior research scholar at New York University and CNN’s presidential historian, suggested to the outlet on Thursday that Canada should rename the deepest (or, as Trump would say, “record deepness“) Great Lake after Trump’s longtime political rival, saying, “You know to play the same game, Canada could rename Lake Superior, ‘Lake Obama,’ and I think that would go over really well in the White House.”

It would also be a fitting answer to Trump’s 2025 reversal of a former Obama decision to rename Mount Denali in Alaska back to its earlier name, Mount McKinley, named for the expansionist 25th U.S. president who oversaw the annexations of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and American Samoa.

That same executive order also renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” a name that hasn’t stuck outside the MAGA crowd.

Trump had already taken a giant L in Toronto long before the current trade war. The St Regis Hotel in the Financial District previously had the “TRUMP” name in giant letters along its roofline, but the 65-storey condo-hotel tower’s purchaser was so opposed to being associated with the Trump brand that it paid a hefty sum to buy out licensing contracts just so it could scrub the U.S. president’s name from its property in July 2017.

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