Google Maps Changes Lake Ontario to Lake America After Trump’s Executive Order

Company says U.S. Geographic Names Information System spurred change in America, and that Canadians users would continue to see Lake Ontario on their maps

Google Maps has changed the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America following Donald Trump’s executive order mandating the change amid his trade war with Canada.

On Saturday, two days after the president cited Executive Order 14172 (Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness) to authorize the Great Lake’s renaming, Google Maps was updated to reflect the change for U.S. users.

Google’s sudden name change — the executive order stated the change must occur within 30 days, not 48 hours — was met with anger by Canadians, Lake Ontario-defending Americans, and HOMES mnemonic rememberers, all of whom accused the company of too quickly complying with Trump’s Lake America demand spurred by a trade war over tariffs.

However, in a statement, Google explained that the change was augmented by the government body that oversees the naming of places.

“The U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has formally changed the name for ‘Lake Ontario’ to ‘Lake America’ in the United States,” Google said. “Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which is GNIS for the U.S., people using Maps in the U.S. will see ‘Lake America,’ those in Canada will continue to see ‘Lake Ontario,’ and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names.”

Soon after Trump’s executive order, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum signed an order demanding that the name change occur “effective immediately.”

“These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now,” Google added.

As the company noted, only Google Maps users in the U.S. will see Lake America, while Canadians will continue to see Lake Ontario. Around the world, the body of water will be shown primarily as Lake Ontario with the parenthetical (Lake America).

Ontario Premier Doug Ford said of the Lake America executive order on Saturday, “I just don’t see the purpose. It’s absolutely backwards. It was like something out of Saturday Night Live when [Trump] signed a document saying ‘change to Lake America.’ No one’s going to call it Lake America. It’s been Lake Ontario for hundreds of years. It’s going to continue to be Lake Ontario.”

This is the second major body of water to get a government-mandated name change under the Trump administration, following the Gulf of Mexico’s rebranding to the Gulf of America, which Google Maps similarly acquiesced to.

At press time, Apple Maps still refers to it as Lake Ontario on their app in the U.S.:

Trump has escalated his conflict with one of the USA's staunchest allies.

Lake Ontario has a new name, at least in the eyes of the American President.

Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this afternoon directing the U.S. government to call the Great Lake “Lake America,” int he latest, bizarre chapter to the increasingly strange relationship between Canada and its southern neighbour.

The change applies to the U.S. federal government, meaning American maps, documents and geographic databases will be updated. It does not, however, give Trump the power to tell Canada what to call a lake that has been sitting between Ontario and New York for thousands of years. The name 'Ontario' comes from an Indigenous Iroquoian term for the lake, recorded by French explorers in the 1640s and later adapted into its present form. The name eventually gave its name to the province of Ontario, when it joined Confederation in 1867.

The (very petty) renaming comes in the middle of an escalating trade war between Ottawa and Washington, with Trump having repeatedly turned his attention toward Canada and its relationship with the United States. Earlier this week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced new retaliatory tariffs as Trump and Republicans continue to threaten Canadian businesses and the country’s sovereignty (though he stressed he ‘loves French-Canadians’). He also seems particularly mad at Ontario Prime Minister Doug Ford, who has repeatedly lashed out at Trump. Ford has already dismissed the idea of the renaming, while federal officials have made clear that Canada will continue using the name Lake Ontario.

The White House says the new name recognizes the lake’s importance to American history, commerce and national interests. The fact that the lake is shared with Canada appears to have been left out of the equation.

This isn’t the first time Trump has made geographic renaming part of his political tactics. Earlier this year, he ordered the U.S. government to use “Gulf of America” in place of the Gulf of Mexico. That decision similarly applied to U.S. federal usage, but has failed to persuade Mexico, or the rest of the world, to adopt it.

LOS ANGELES - 1978: Country singer Dolly Parton poses for a portrait session in 1978 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Harry Langdon/Getty Images)

Presidents across party lines celebrated Dolly Parton on Tuesday following her death, speaking to the country icon’s ability to transcend politics through her work that often spoke louder than words.

On Tuesday, former Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Bush each paid tribute to Parton, while President Donald Trump ordered that flags be flown at half-staff for the next week to honor “one of the greatest Country singers, and far beyond, EVER.”

In their statements, the former presidents praised both Parton’s music and philanthropic endeavors. In 2020, Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University, which helped fund coronavirus research and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine. The legendary singer also famously founded the Imagination Library, established in honor of her father Robert Lee Parton Sr., which distributes books to children in multiple countries.

In a statement posted on social media, Obama highlighted Parton’s humble roots, colossal impact in music and Hollywood, and her philanthropic work. “It’s hard to imagine many people having a bigger impact than Dolly Parton. Born in a one-room cabin, she earned 11 Grammys and an Emmy, built a business empire, helped millions of kids learn to read, and — as if that wasn’t enough — helped accelerate the research that led to the Moderna COVID vaccine,” Obama wrote. “What a life. Michelle and I are thinking of Dolly’s family and her many, many fans.”

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“Dolly Parton was one of a kind—a great songwriter and performer who told the stories of everyday Americans with honesty, humility, and heart,” wrote Clinton in another tribute. “She rose high from her East Tennessee roots and never forgot where she came from. And she always believed in giving back, especially in her efforts to promote literacy. Hillary and I were big fans and first saw her in 1974, and will always be grateful for the music and the memories.”

Bush and former first lady Laura Bush also joined fans in mourning Parton’s death. “We loved her music and her style. She was a great entertainer and even greater person,” wrote the former president. “We respected her work to promote literacy, advance health, and strengthen communities. Dolly was a talented and hardworking American who will be missed.”

Rather than taking a hard line on politics, Parton chose to shine a light on her values through both her work and own endeavors. The icon, a beloved supporter of the LGBTQ community, wrote and sang the Oscar-nominated song “Travelin’ Thru” from Transamerica, a 2005 movie about a transgender woman and her son. In 2017, Parton collaborated with her goddaughter, Miley Cyrus, to record “Rainbowland,” a hopeful tribute imagining a world of complete inclusivity and equality.

When speaking to Rolling Stone about the track the year it released, Parton called the song “one of those things we felt like the world needed a little message right now.” She continued, “If we could just do a little better, try a little harder, try to get along a little better, we could live in Rainbowland. If nothing else, if we tried a little harder at least we’d be a little more colorful than it is right now, a little brighter, a little shinier out there.”

Trump has escalated his conflict with one of the country's staunchest allies.

In the absence of a coherent political strategy, threaten something ridiculous. Such has been the strategy of the Trump administration in virtually every major foreign policy and economic decision of his second term. As relations with Canada — our northern ally and major trade partner — collapse into a trade war spurred by the American president’s tariff threats, things have once again escalated into the absurd.

On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to goad Canada, writing that “the United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.”

The threat mirrors Trump’s claims that he holds the authority to rename major global geographical features at will. Notably the president has attempted to rebrand the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” It’s all a part of a larger imperialist impulse on Trump’s part. The president has floated invading and annexing Greenland, Venezuela, and Canada, claiming he will make each the “51st state.”

“Over the last 10 years, the United States lost, on average, 60 Billion Dollars a year with Canada. No more,” he added in a subsequent post — which misrepresented the annual import/export differential between Canada and the United States as a “loss” and not an exchange of goods.

Americans can count the death of North American free trade among the many casualties of the second Trump administration. Earlier this month, Trump threatened to level punishing, 50 percent tariffs on over $20 billion of Canadian imports. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has threatened dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs.

“In recent days, the United States proposed new terms that were uneconomic, unfair, and undermined the net benefits for Canada and called into question the reliability of any deal,” Carney said on Sunday. “In short, they asked too much and they offered too little. You’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked.”

Canadian goods account for approximately 10-15 percent of all U.S. imports, and is the nation’s second biggest trade partner by volume after Mexico. With costs for everyday goods continuing to rise, and an affordability crisis threatening Republicans’ unified party hold on Congress after the midterms, a trade war with a historic ally comes off as wholly idiotic. Maine Senator Susan Colling, a Republican facing a tough reelection bid in a state that borders Canada, said in a recent interview that “imposing new tariffs on Canada is a mistake.”

In a post on social media, she warned that continuing down this path “will increase costs for Maine families, as most businesses will have no choice but to pass on the tariffs to their customers through higher prices.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has threatened to cut off energy exports to the United States from Ontario, telling reporters on Monday that “everything is on the table,” and that Americans “won’t get a grain of sand” out of the province that powers millions of homes in the United States if things continue to spiral.

As for the American president, he had some choice words.

Trump can “”kiss my ass.”

Donald Trump in the Oval Office in August 2026.

President Donald Trump told the Department of Justice to settle its antitrust suit with Live Nation after meeting with CEO Michael Rapino in the Oval Office in late February, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The new story digs into the lobbying efforts and behind-the-scenes maneuvering that preceded Live Nation’s surprise settlement with the DOJ in early March, just one week into the company’s federal antitrust trial. While some co-plaintiff states signed onto that deal, many continued with the case, and a jury ultimately found Live Nation liable for operating as a monopoly in April.

The Wall Street Journal previously reported that the settlement was reached after a meeting at the White House on March 5 attended by Rapino, the company’s lawyers, and DOJ officials (including former Attorney General Pam Bondi). But Rapino had also met with Trump a few weeks earlier.

According to the report, Rapino’s Feb. 27 meeting at the Oval Office primarily centered around Trump’s efforts to overhaul the Kennedy Center, and the president’s desire to enlist Live Nation to handle the venue’s operations. But during the meeting, the president also asked Rapino why the company hadn’t settled its antitrust case with the DOJ yet. After, Trump reportedly directed the DOJ to strike a deal.

Reps for Live Nation did not immediately return requests for comment. Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, said, “Unlike Joe Biden, President Trump has not weaponized the Department of Justice against his political foes or used it to help his friends. The Department is focused on restoring law and order and keeping Americans safe.”

The DOJ’s settlement with Live Nation has drawn significant criticism, both for how the deal was reached, and the terms it contains. While it did force some concessions from Live Nation on key issues involving its amphitheater business and Ticketmaster’s exclusivity contracts, many claimed it did not go far enough to address the company’s alleged monopoly over the live entertainment industry. For instance, the plaintiff states are currently seeking to force Live Nation to divest from Ticketmaster following their victory in court.

Dan Wall, Live Nation’s executive vice president of corporate and regulatory affairs, touted the terms of the deal in a new statement shared with the WSJ. “Our critics are comparing this settlement to the irrational hope of breaking up Live Nation and Ticketmaster,” Wall said. “For the actual claims in this case, the DOJ and settling states got as much or more as they could have expected to win in court.”

He also defended Live Nation’s actions as it worked to reach a settlement with the DOJ: “The only reason we went above the Antitrust Division to senior DOJ leadership is because no one there would speak to us. When you’ve been unable to get a meeting for six months, you have every right to try something else.”

Live Nation made significant efforts to lobby the DOJ and Trump administration into dropping, or settling, the antitrust. The company worked closely with many people close to the president, including Kellyanne Conway and MAGA influencer-lawyer Mike Davis (who previously helped lobby the DOJ to drop its challenge to a $14 billion merger between Hewlett Packard and Juniper Networks). And Trump involved himself reportedly after hearing about the case from prominent people.

According to the WSJ, Live Nation’s efforts also included hiring top law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to lead its settlement talks. The Sullivan & Cromwell team reportedly included two antitrust experts, but also a lawyer named James McDonald, who had little antitrust experience, but was representing Trump in his criminal cases in New York. (In July, Trump appointed McDonald to lead the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.)

Additionally, two top political appointees at DOJ reportedly had an influence over an early set of proposed settlements. One pushed the lawyers at the antitrust division to remove language forcing Live Nation to sell Ticketmaster from a draft response; he and the other appointee also reportedly echoed talking points Live Nation had unsuccessfully tried in court.

As for the case itself, it’s now in the remedies phase, during which Judge Arun Subramanian will decide what kind of punishment Live Nation will receive. Subramanian also has to review and approve the DOJ’s settlement with Live Nation, and decide whether it was reached in the public interest. In a July letter to the judge, the plaintiff states said said they had “significant concerns” that it was not in the public interest, and asked the DOJ to share new details about how the settlement was reached.

Elon Musk posts incessantly about protecting Western civilization.

“She’s a traitor to the West.”

Elon Musk posted this on X on July 25 in response to a clip of Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, saying on CNBC that Musk propagates a “caricatured” image of Europe as a deteriorating, unlivable hell hole. Beddoes had recently interviewed Musk, challenging his views on Europe, and confronting him for supporting far-right politicians and parties from Germany to the UK. Beddoes never questioned the hallmarks of liberal democracy: free and fair elections, separation of powers, equal protection under the law, or human rights. But in Musk’s mind, her pushing back on his caricature of Europe as a continent colonized by immigrant invaders proved enough to make her a “traitor to the West.”

The idea of “saving the West” isn’t limited to the feverish online posting of the world’s richest man. If one surveys the conservative media landscape on any given day, the call to “rescue Western civilization” appears ubiquitous. For example, on August 5, 2026, the day after Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan, the civilizationist discourse popped up in every corner of the American right. Podcaster Benny Johnson called for more politicians willing to “fight for Western civilization.” Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Seminary, released a podcast interview titled “The Battle Western Civilization.” Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State, posted: “The Democratic Party is being taken over by anti-American candidates who hate the values that underpin Western civilization.”

Noah Rothman, senior writer at the National Review, posted in response to a video montage of Abdul El-Sayed: “This race isn’t just about tax rates, or health care, or immigration enforcement. It’s about more than politics now. This is a fight over America and whether the enemies of Western civilization are right.”

None of this even touches the civilizationist outrage many on the American right — including Musk — expressed over the casting of Black actors in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

Civilizationalist discourse isn’t a new summer trend. It’s surged since Trump’s second inauguration. In a July 2025 interview, Lara Trump even asked her father-in-law about his supposed nickname, the “bodyguard of Western civilization.”

I’ve spent the last two and a half years investigating the growing alliance among Protestant Reconstructionist Christians like Doug Wilson and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth; radical traditional Catholics like Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation and Vice President JD Vance; and Silicon Valley technocrats like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Curtis Yarvin. What’s become clear: “Saving Western civilization” is now the unifying rallying cry of the American right, surpassing Trump’s infamous “make America great again” slogan and even the Christian nationalist mantra of taking America back for God. There’s a reason for this change. As I argue in my new book American Caesar, the crusade to rescue Western civilization provides an umbrella discourse that unites tech reactionaries with traditional Catholics and extremist Protestants in a loose alliance against immigrants, non-Christians, the LGBTQ community, and anyone who criticizes the United States.

While extremist Christians and Silicon Valley technocrats often disagree on issues related to AI, surveillance, and family, they are aligned on the idea that saving Western civilization from external threats like Muslims and migrants and internal threats like antifa, trans people, and feminists is the paramount issue of our time. Even though Elon Musk is not religious, many Christian nationalists see him as an ally in saving Western civilization from the foreign and domestic vandals they believe threaten it. By couching their shared mission in civilizational, rather than religious terms, they can forge a loose coalition against the groups they perceive as common enemies and existential threats to “our way of life.”

As opposed to Christian nationalism or MAGA, civilizationalism also provides a horizontal plane that transcends the United States, including Europe in the effort to rescue civilization from both attacking barbarians and domestic enemies.

In many ways, the civilizationalist discourse emanating from every corner of the American right is an escalation of the Christian nationalist currents that have been center stage during the Trump era. As the scholars Yilmaz and Morieson argue, “Civilizationism is an idea which posits that the world and its peoples can be divided into several ‘civilizations’, most of them defined by religion.” Western civilizationalists render “Western” people as moral, rational, and outright superior to others based on their religious-cultural values. This escalates MAGA’s hallmark xenophobia and Christian nationalism because civilizationalist discourse posits that “non-Westerners” “belong to a foreign civilization with inferior values derived from an inferior religion.” In other words, they are inexorably less than “us” as a people, and therefore unassimilable. There’s no room here for legal migration, pluralism, or multiculturalism. Rather, we are left with a vision akin to Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations model, wherein different people groups across the world hold competing values that can never be cohered. Moreover, American citizens who promote “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” or “anti-capitalist” views are suspected of being linked to either Islamist, or communist foreign networks. They are a foreign enemy cosplaying as real Americans. The goal of civilizationism is isolationist purity. The strategy to achieve it? Civilizational warfare.

Thus, we arrive at a startling truth: When Christian nationalists and technocrats rally to “save Western civilization,” their efforts are not meant to shore up democratic institutions, reinvigorate civic norms surrounding free and fair elections, protect free speech, or defend free thought. When a Texas A&M professor was told he couldn’t teach Plato — the pre-eminent philosopher of ancient Greece and perhaps all of Western civilization (outside of Jesus) — without permission, there was no uproar. When books are banned, the civilizationalists don’t blink.

Their retrieval of Western virtue is not focused on the merits of Athenian democracy or the Roman Republic, much less the Enlightenment values of free choice, personal autonomy, or freedom from religious imposition and/or censorship. In this case, saving Western civilization doesn’t mean empowering We the People, it means rescuing the country from the “immoral elites” who have sold out our country to inferior foreigners; the domestic infidels who refuse to abide by the binary gender and sex norms that both technocrats like Musk and Christian nationalists like Vance and Hegseth prescribe.

If a pure society, rather than a free one, is what they are trying to save, we are left with an important question: Who is going to do the rescuing?

There has been plenty of extremism among Christian nationalists for decades. However, what we are witnessing now is frightening escalation to something more radical: the desire to replace We the People with an all-powerful leader to purify the United States — a Red Caesar, a Protestant Franco, an Appalachian Pinochet, an Unbound Executive, or a Tech Monarch. In other words, a second American Revolution, but this time to seat someone like a king, rather than to break away from one.

There is an abundance of evidence that Trump and his allies are trying to manifest something resonant with these models. Elon Musk’s implementation of DOGE early in Trump’s second term echoed the tech-dissident Curtis Yarvin’s notoriously monarchist ideals. When he took the helm of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency early in 2025, Musk began implementing a “hard reboot” of the government following Yarvin’s blueprint. Musk’s DOGE lieutenants openly claim Yarvin as their greatest philosophical inspiration for gutting federal agencies, laying off workers, and destroying the social safety net. One DOGE team member told The Washington Post that Yarvin represents “the most crisp articulation” of what DOGE is trying to achieve. Another said that “it’s an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin,” and are using his authoritarian theory “to empower people on the ground to actually do stuff — even if they can’t admit it publicly.”

There is more evidence in the form of Trump’s defiance of the courts, particularly when it comes to his effort to rid the nation of the kind of external threats so often cited by Musk and his fellow guardians of civilization. An Associated Press review from May 2026 found that in 31 lawsuits his administration had “250 instances of noncompliance” in immigration cases, “from failing to return property to keeping immigrants locked up past court-ordered release dates.”

The list goes on: The Trump administration kidnapped and imprisoned Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela and took control of the country’s oil. Now, Marco Rubio is ruling the country from afar with no plan for elections any time soon. To date, Trump has not received congressional approval for the war with Iran, which has been ongoing since February. Trump tried to rename the Kennedy Center. He demolished the East Wing of the White House. And his former personal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, was just appointed head of the Department of Justice. Oh, lest I forget: Trump ignored the Constitution completely when he tried to deport U.S.-born Americans.

The move toward an American Caesar, in many respects, is no longer a Christian nationalist movement, at least not in the way we often think of it.

The dream of the right is no longer to restore a time when white Christianity went hand in hand with America; a restoration of the supposed pax Americana of the 1950s. The outlook now is more grim and more extreme.

In the face of demographic change, cultural progress, and global crises, Christian Reconstructionists, reactionary Catholics, and Silicon Valley magnates long to “save” Western civilization by replacing American democracy with a post-constitutional Caesar who will rule without the burden of checks and balances or the sharing of power in any meaningful way. Trump is doing everything he can to oblige them.

Bradley Onishi is author of American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America Into a Monarchy, on sale September 15 via Macmillan Publishers.