Donald Trump has warned that he is not “kidding” about his plans to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” as his feud with Canada escalates.
During a rambling telephone interview on Glenn Beck’s radio show Wednesday morning, the 80-year-old president accused Canada of being “one of the worst countries in the world to deal with” amid the trade war reignited by Trump for no apparent reason.
Trump added that he wanted to “take on” America’s neighbor and longtime ally over tariff disputes before mentioning the renaming of the lake, which is split between the U.S.-Canada border.
“I said we’re going to take them on, we’re going to stop it. And you saw the Lake Ontario. You know, people thought I was kidding. Maybe I wasn’t because the last one you saw was the Gulf of Mexico; it’s now the Gulf of America,” Trump said. “So now we have a Gulf, and we have a lake.”
Trump originally announced that he was giving “serious consideration” to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America to prove that the U.S. does not want to do “business” with Canada anymore.
The deranged suggestion arrived after Trump imposed 50 percent import levies on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods over the weekend. In response, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Canada would impose its own $20 billion in retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods.
Like the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario is a shared waterway overseen by several international and regional agencies. Trump’s attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” is not binding and has been largely ignored by the rest of the world.
New York State and Ontario each govern their own portion of Lake Ontario, and Trump does not have the authority to dictate what the Canadian side calls the body of water.
Elsewhere during his appearance on Beck’s show, Trump ignored the potential economic devastation of the U.S. starting a trade war with Canada.
“They don’t have anything that we have to have. OK, we can get by. I mean, there are a couple of things that would make it a little inconvenient, but we can get them elsewhere,” Trump said. “And it’s time to teach Canada you can’t do this anymore.”
