Joe Rogan thinks he knows exactly why Donald Trump wants to rename Lake Ontario.
The podcast host discussed the lake on his Tuesday episode, after Trump signed an executive order to rename the historic body of water “Lake America” on Thursday. The real reason Trump made the move, Rogan said, is to “distract you from the fact that we’re in a war that we can’t win in Iran.”
Rogan went on to assert that the renaming “doesn’t make any sense” otherwise. “Like, who cares? It’s Lake Ontario. It’s a good name. We’ve had that name forever.”
Lake Ontario had its name before the founding of both the United States and Canada, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney pointed out in a social media post reacting to Trump’s executive order on Friday.
“We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms,” Carney added, mocking Trump’s habitual rebranding of geographic landmarks and water names. Still, he said, “Canadian women and men also know that things must be called by their name, and this lake is called Lake Ontario—today and forever.”
Carney’s message was just one humiliation Trump has faced since the arbitrary name change. The change, which has no legal standing in Canada, has only given Canadians more fodder to mock the president—and Americans themselves showed their disapproval in a Reuters/Ipsos poll in which 63 percent of respondents said they did not support it. The move was part of a meltdown from Trump that followed the breakdown of trade negotiations with Canada.
Rogan, who endorsed Trump in 2024, may have made it known that he was one of many Americans who find the renaming pointless—but that doesn’t mean he’s come to his senses. The podcaster also dedicated a portion of his show to peddling more conspiracy theories about the COVID vaccine. He echoed Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s revival of an old and inaccurate theory that the vaccine increases the risk of miscarriage in the first trimester.
The theory gained traction after senators released text messages during their investigation into the former COVID czar that showed Fauci expressing apprehension during the shots’ early rollout.
“Fauci lied, and he lied through the entire media thing,” Rogan declared. “First of all, he lied about the miscarriage risk for women in the first trimester… I don’t know the specifics,” he continued, but “there’s like a high risk of miscarriage. It’s very high.”
Studies have consistently shown that that is not the case.
The University of Edinburgh reviewed 21 studies, including 5 randomized trials and 16 observational studies, reporting on 149,685 women, and found no link between COVID vaccination and adverse outcomes for pregnant people.
Still, Rogan duciously declared, “I know five women that had miscarriages after they got vaccinated.”
