I have hiked the forests that ring this lake. I have walked a dog along its shoreline when the water was the color of wet slate and the gulls were screaming. I have run its paths in July heat and February ice. I know this lake the way you know a neighbor for a lifetime. Its name is Ontario. It was Ontario before the United States existed and it will be Ontario after the current occupant of the Oval Office is a Jeopardy answer nobody gets right.

On Thursday, the President of the United States signed an executive order to change that. He is not asking Congress. He is not asking New York, whose shoreline this happens to be. He is not asking Canada, which owns roughly half the water in question. He is directing the Secretary of the Interior to pupdate a federal database so that, within the borders of the United States government’s own paperwork, Lake Ontario will now be filed under “Lake America.”

---

This is not new behavior. It is a rerun. On his first day back in office, the President renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” a body of water that has carried its name since the sixteenth century and answers to no American agency. That stunt survived exactly as long as it took other countries to keep calling it what it has always been called. This one will last about as long. Half the lake belongs to a country that did not get a vote, will not be changing its maps, and has a Premier who has already called the President a “loser” and a “dictator” in the same news cycle. The rename applies to precisely one government’s internal filing system. Everyone else on Earth is free to ignore it, and will.

The occasion for this act of cartographic heroism is a trade war. Trade talks with Canada collapsed. The United States slapped fifty percent tariffs on Canadian steel and cars. Canada hit back with tariffs on billions of dollars in American goods. And somewhere in the middle of that very real, very consequential economic dispute, the President’s response was to open an image editor, cross out the words “Lake Ontario” in black, and stamp “LAKE AMERICA” over the top in gold letters, then post it to social media like a ransom note.

---

Someone will say this is strength. Someone always does. The argument goes: a President standing up to a neighbor who’s been “ripping off” the United States for years, asserting sovereignty, projecting resolve. Take that case seriously for one sentence, because it deserves exactly one.

Renaming a database entry costs nothing. It requires no vote, no negotiation, no Canadian signature, no tariff repealed, no factory reopened, no farmer made whole. It is the cheapest possible substitute for the hard, boring, unglamorous work of actually resolving a trade dispute, which is what strength in this job would actually look like. A man who wanted to prove he could beat Canada in a trade war would beat Canada in a trade war. A man who wanted to look like he’d beaten Canada in a trade war would sign a piece of paper renaming a lake and let the cable news chyrons do the rest. Only one of those men has to show results.

Guess which one we got.

The President himself gave away the joke. Asked about it, he mused that since the country now has a renamed gulf and a renamed lake, all that’s left is an ocean, maybe two. Perhaps the Atlantic next. Perhaps the Pacific. This is not a policy. This is a man discovering that a Sharpie has no natural stopping point.

---

Here is what won’t change. The Wyandot word this lake was named for will still mean what it meant. The International Joint Commission will still manage this water jointly with Canada, by treaty, regardless of what the Geographic Names Information System says today. The fish will still cross the border they’ve never once respected. My dog will still walk the same beach, and so will I, and neither of us will be consulting a federal database to figure out what to call it.

But if a President gets to hand out new names by decree, on a whim, with no vote and no cost and no consequence, then so do I. So here is mine, effective immediately, and it will hold in this essay and every one that follows it, unlike his.

From this day forward, this President of the United States will be known as the Sharpie King. Ruler of only the borders he can draw himself. Sovereign over nothing he can’t rename.

Lake Ontario, meanwhile, remains Lake Ontario. It was never actually up for a vote.