President Donald Trump’s announcement last week that he would rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” managed to make only a ripple in the news cycle, which could signal a new problem for him.
The 80-year-old president has dominated politics for a decade with his ability to drive conversations wherever he wanted and declare victory over whatever he liked, but Slate’s Ben Jacobs noticed something about the splash he tried to create amid an ongoing trade dispute with Canada.
“Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had the skyhook. Michael Jordan had the fadeaway. Donald Trump has … ‘the distraction’ — at least, he used to,” Jacobs wrote. “For the past decade of political life, moves like those have been enough to commandeer news cycles, sometimes for days or even weeks. Except, of late, it’s running out of steam.”
The move echoes Trump’s first-day-in-office decision in 2025 to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” an easy troll that was eagerly picked up by his supporters, but that’s not quite what happened this time.
Trump’s Lake Ontario declaration came as his approval ratings have fallen to record lows in public polling, and the reaction has largely been indifference rather than the sustained attention his rebranding efforts once commanded.
“Upon reaching back into his bag of tricks, it turns out they’ve gone stale,” Jacobs wrote.
The announcement followed a similar claim Trump made regarding the Strait of Hormuz, which he described as American territory in a social media post, placing it alongside Greenland, Canada and Venezuela among territories he has floated annexing.
While the Lake Ontario renaming drew limited domestic attention, it was treated as significant news in Canada, covered extensively by outlets including the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and said the episode has further soured Canadian public opinion toward Trump and the United States.
“Certainly MAGA allies have rejoiced in his renaming, but domestic attention moved on pretty quickly,” Jacobs wrote. “In the meantime, nothing has changed about Lake Ontario … Nothing has changed with the trade war between the United States and Canada either.”
“Trump was able to drive the news,” he concluded. “But not for weeks or even days. Just for a few minutes on a Thursday afternoon in August.”
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