The Republican president signed an executive order updating the lake's name for the U.S. geographic naming service. Trump cannot, however, force Canada to follow his preferred naming convention.
The president has been floating the idea of the name change in recent days as the U.S. announced it was imposing 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods over the weekend after talks between the countries broke down. Canada struck back on Tuesday, slapping retaliatory tariffs on about $20 billion worth of U.S. goods, from industrial products to everyday purchases.
After President Donald Trump's move to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America, civics buffs on the internet were quick to point out how it would change one of their childhood geography lessons.
Students are taught that one way to remember the names of the Great Lakes is to use the mnemonic H-O-M-E-S, which stands for Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior.
Now, they say, taking out Ontario and adding America would change the acronym to S-H-A-M-E.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford rejected President Donald Trump's move to rename Lake Ontario "Lake America," writing on social media: "It's Lake Ontario to Canadians and the rest of the world. Now and forever."
Ford told The Associated Press earlier this week that Ronald Reagan would be "throwing up" and "disgusted with President Trump" over Trump's tariff policies and his departure from Reagan's free-trade legacy. Trump, in turn, dismissed Ford's comments as "bluster," called him Carney's "flunky" and mocked him as the "less charismatic, intelligent, and overall unimpressive brother" of the late Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.
Trump's renaming order came days after that exchange, raising the possibility that the move was also aimed at the Ontario premier.
The president is reviving the phrase that came to haunt George W. Bush in Iraq — to claim success in Iran.
The president posted on his social media site depicting himself over images of American flags, an aircraft carrier and jets, as well as a frowning Bush next to a sign reading "Mission Not Accomplished: 2001-2021."
The post also shows Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed by strikes in February, next to a sign reading "Mission Accomplished 2026."
Bush stood on an aircraft carrier under a "Mission Accomplished" banner just six weeks into an Iraq war that dragged on for years, a move that came to be seen as a political blunder.
Trump's latest post also ignores that Trump himself was president for the four years of his first term during the time his post implies U.S. military failure.
Despite the president's insistence, the war in Iran has continued, with no end in sight.
Three staff members from the Stars and Stripes military news outlet are suing to challenge their recent firings by the Pentagon, accusing the Trump administration of violating their First Amendment free speech rights to speak out against government interference in their work.
Stars and Stripes publisher Max Lederer, Editor-in-Chief Erik Slavin and Middle East reporter Lara Korte are named as plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit filed Thursday in Washington, D.C.
The Pentagon, which partially funds the news outlet, fired them last week. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit's allegations.
Slavin says he was dismissed for insubordination after giving an interview in which he objected to potential censorship by the U.S. military. Korte participated in the same interview. Lederer was dismissed shortly after announcing his impending retirement.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected Trump's move to rename Lake Ontario as "Lake America," invoking the lake's Indigenous roots while pointedly casting the episode as part of a transformation of the United States under Trump.
In a social media post, Carney noted that Lake Ontario takes its name from the Wendat word "Ontari'io," meaning "the lake is beautiful, the lake is big," and said the name predates both the Canadian Confederation and the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
"We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms," Carney said.
"Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario — then, now and always."
Just seconds after the Trump administration's lawyer, Bradley Mayers, began making his case at a nearly two-hour hearing, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper interrupted to ask why the Kennedy Center needed to begin inscribing the president's name on the institution's facade as soon as Sept. 8.
"What's magic about that date?" Cooper asked, quipping that sometimes judges travel over the Labor Day holiday.
Mayers responded that the timeline was in accordance with a vote earlier this month by the Trump-aligned board. As he returned to his arguments that renovations at the Kennedy Center require energy and talent, Cooper interjected again.
"That's all fine and good," the judge said. "What does that have to do with what Congress intended in these statutes? That's really what's before me."
Canadian historian Robert Bothwell says Trump's move to rename Lake Ontario as "Lake America" should be met with ridicule.
"People should be standing around the capital laughing themselves sick," Bothwell said. "Everybody knows the Gulf of America is a joke, and this is a joke in an awful way."
Bothwell says the renaming fits what he sees as Trump's broader effort to subordinate Canada and said it makes a negotiated settlement between the two countries "next to impossible.
He also warned that if Apple or Google adopt "Lake America" on their maps, it could provoke a backlash in Canada.
"It's an insult," Bothwell said, adding that Canadians could respond with boycotts that might grow into a broader political movement.
The U.S. Department of Justice is suing four states that provide in-state tuition for students without legal status, saying the practice discriminates against U.S. citizens and encourages illegal immigration.
The complaints against Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington were filed Thursday, marking just the latest legal challenges over tuition breaks for such students. In all, the department has filed 21 lawsuits, with five of those resulting in judges permanently enjoining and declaring unconstitutional laws that gave reduced tuition to students living in the U.S. illegally.
"This is a simple matter of federal law: colleges cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens," Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said in a statement. "This Department of Justice will not tolerate American students being treated like second-class citizens in their own country."
Federal prosecutors are seeking to keep the four states from providing in-state tuition rates for all immigrants who maintain in-state residency, regardless of whether those students are lawfully present in the United States.
The Trump administration relied on flawed logic to justify scrapping vehicle emissions standards earlier this year, according to a new study by a group of economists published Thursday in the journal Science.
It scrapped the emissions standards when it revoked the endangerment finding, which had long served as the legal underpinning for federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.
Researchers who examined the Environmental Protection Agency's analysis for doing so said eliminating the rules will cost the country billions of dollars, not save it billions.
Even setting aside environmental reasons for keeping emissions rules, "the economic case for the rollback of the standards still falls apart," said Antonio Bento, one of the study's authors.
The EPA said it stands by its economic analysis.
"We will not attempt to push an EV mandate on the American people based on facially implausible projections," the agency said in a statement.
The program provides grants to health care providers for contraception, cancer screenings and other services, mainly for low-income women.
More than 20 states, including New York, Massachusetts and California, argue in a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that the department broke the law when it set stricter rules this year for which providers qualify for the program, including requiring them to end diversity programs.
"This lawsuit is about ensuring safe and effective family planning and reproductive care remains accessible to all," California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a news conference, adding that the new requirements were politically motivated.
During Kennedy's confirmation hearings to be the nation's health secretary, Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., asked about Kennedy's 2019 trip to Samoa at least three times.
Again and again, Kennedy denied that his reason for the trip was related to vaccines.
Markey said new documents published by the AP and The Guardian on Thursday "confirm what we already knew: RFK Jr. lied to Congress."
"This is a pattern, not a slip," Markey said in a statement. "He should never have been confirmed, and he cannot be trusted to run HHS for even one more day."
In response to questions from the AP, the Department of Health and Human Services said that the Samoa visit "was unrelated to vaccines."
Trump has wide latitude over how the U.S. government recognizes geographic places and landmarks.
But he can't force Canada or individual citizens on either side of the border to follow his preferred naming conventions.
"The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don't expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer," Trump posted Tuesday on Truth Social.
This latest branding move — reminiscent of his move to rechristen the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America" — highlights how much Trump's rhetoric and trade policy have sundered the previously warm relationship between Washington and Ottawa.
In a scheduled announcement hours after Trump's post, Canadian leaders unveiled tariffs on about $20 billion worth of American goods, including steel, dairy products, appliances and farm equipment — a retaliation for the Trump administration's new 50% tariffs on Canadian goods.
The lake's name comes from the Huron Indigenous people's word "oniatarí:io," meaning "lake of shining waters," and predates European settlement in the region. The province, founded in 1867, took its name from the lake.
The International Hydrographic Organization — of which both the United States and Canada are members — works to ensure that the world's seas, oceans and navigable waters are surveyed and charted uniformly, and also names some of them. But there is no single international body that determines the names of international bodies of water.