‘Sad and pathetic’: U.S. politicians condemn Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario

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Elsewhere, politicians in New York, the state bordering Ontario, also expressed opposition to the name change.

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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office said in a post: “An acronym for the Great Lakes used to be HOMES. Thanks to Donald Trump, it’s now SHAME.”

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Chuck Schumer, the U.S. Senate minority leader, called the order “sad and pathetic,” and U.S. Rep. Joe Morelle suggested the renaming is “an attempted distraction from the President’s disastrous trade talks with Canada.”

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In a social media post, he said: “While Rochester families deal with the impacts of a trade war he started, President Trump is playing games with a map.”

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Outside of New York, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said he’d rather see every hospital that had been closed due to Trump’s policies renamed “the Donald Trump Memorial Hospital” than for there to be a “Lake America.”

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Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock said in a social media post that while Americans “can’t afford to fill up their tank…our President is spending his day renaming a lake.” He added: “What a joke.”

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And Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy wrote that Trump spending “all his time on this BS” is the reason why Americans’ gas and grocery prices are so high.

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The official X account for U.S. House Democrats posted: “It’s too expensive to live and Donald Trump is renaming lakes.”

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Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes, is located between New York State and Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, home to about 16 million people.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney responded to Trump’s actions shortly after the executive order was signed, explaining on social media that “the name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big’.”

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He added that the name is more than 400 years old and predates both Canadian Confederation and the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

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“We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms,” he wrote. “Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario — then, now and always.”

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