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Trump Signs the Order Renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America, Aug. 27, 2026

August 27, 2026 · The White House · 0:12:17

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

At a White House signing on August 27, 2026, President Donald Trump signed the executive order renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America. “We’re going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario effective immediately to Lake America. That’s going to take place right now as I sign the order,” he said. An aide explained the mechanism: the order “directs Secretary Burgum and the Department of the Interior to update the geographic names information system to reflect that lake once known as Lake Ontario will from this day forward be known as Lake America,” on the stated ground that most of the lake’s volume and its deepest parts sit in United States territory. “We’ve done everything that you have to do and this is official effective immediately,” the President said.

The President opened the session with an economic marker — “the stock market just hit another all-time high. That’s the 81st time during a brief one and a half years” — and congratulated Darlene Graham on her South Carolina primary victory two nights earlier. In the questions that followed he said President Putin was “not going to be attacking a NATO territory,” put the Canada trade loss at “$62 billion a year on average,” and previewed a Texas trip to campaign for Ken Paxton.

Why it matters

Geographic naming runs through Secretary Doug Burgum’s Interior Department, and a renaming order is a signed, dated act of the kind this chronicle records exactly: the name change takes effect through the federal geographic names system the order directs Interior to update.

Scoreboard watch

This is a candidate item for the weekly scoreboard: a signed executive order renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America, effective immediately. What the scoreboard will follow is the implementation — the geographic names update and the name’s adoption on federal maps and publications.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Participates in Signing Time, Aug. 27, 2026” (official upload, embedded above). Remarks as delivered at the signing.