Majority of Americans reject Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario to Lake America, poll finds

Lake America. Say it out loud a few times and see if it stops sounding like a joke someone at the Department of Interior lost a bet on. Sixty-three percent of the country isn't buying it, and honestly, that's a lower number than we'd have guessed. Lake Ontario has had that name since before there was a United States to rename it. It's not a hill worth dying on, and it's definitely not a trade war worth fighting on.

The instinct behind it, we get. Canada's been throwing elbows on tariffs and dairy quotas for years while lecturing us about fair trade, and there's something satisfying about a petty, symbolic jab back. But renaming a body of water shared with another country doesn't punish Ottawa. It just gives late-night hosts a week of free material and makes the actual trade fight look like a sideshow. Real leverage comes from tariffs, from supply chain moves, from things that show up on a balance sheet. Nobody in Ottawa is losing sleep over a name change nobody in Buffalo is going to use anyway.

There's a difference between projecting strength and projecting spectacle, and this leans hard into the second category. If the administration wants credit for playing hardball on trade, it should let the actual policy do the talking. Stunts like this hand critics an easy, cheap win and distract from arguments we could actually be making forcefully, like the ones about Canadian dairy protectionism or lumber tariffs that most Americans have never even heard explained. Pick the fights that matter. This wasn't one of them.