President Donald Trump issues order renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” prompting Wisconsin lawmakers to joke about Lake Michigan

President Donald Trump’s administration issued an executive order renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” according to the White House’s published text of the action released on Aug. 27. The order states it is being carried out by the authority vested in the president by the Constitution and U.S. laws, and it directs the administration to recognize the new name in accordance with its stated policy.

The order, titled “Honoring the American History of the Great Lakes and Renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America,” says the administration’s policy is to recognize “the American history” associated with the Great Lakes and ties the action to a prior executive order, Executive Order 14172, announced Jan. 20, 2025. The White House publication frames the renaming as part of an administration effort to adopt honorific naming tied to its policy approach.

After the order was made public, Wisconsin politicians reacted with humor about whether a similar renaming could spread to other Great Lakes, including Lake Michigan. The Hill reported on Thursday that Wisconsin lawmakers joked about the potential naming change to Lake Michigan in response to Trump’s Lake Ontario order.

The White House posting does not, in the pages available here, identify a schedule for implementation or list specific federal agencies that would immediately update maps, signage, or other official references. It does, however, present the renaming as a formal policy action that is intended to govern how the administration treats the lake’s name moving forward.

The Hill also reported that the order is being carried out amid U.S.-Canada trade tensions. That context is attributed to The Hill’s reporting in this story and is not laid out in the White House text excerpt provided in the materials reviewed here.

Legal and administrative practice would typically require federal guidance to be applied consistently across official uses of place names, which can affect procurement documents, geographic references in government communications, and how agencies label regions in public-facing information. Whether any agency will publish additional instructions or whether the new name will be reflected in federal records would be expected to follow through as departments implement the order’s direction.

If federal agencies treat the name as an across-the-board change, the impact could extend beyond communications to the practical work of cataloging and referencing bodies of water in federal databases and datasets. For now, the immediate public-facing change is the executive order itself and the resulting political reaction, including the Wisconsin jokes cited by The Hill.