State Lawmaker Wants Trump to Rename Lake Erie as 'Lake Pennsylvania'

We’ll admit it: the first time we read that a Pennsylvania state representative wants President Trump to rename Lake Erie “Lake Pennsylvania,” we checked to make sure it wasn’t a prank. Lake Erie has been Lake Erie since before any of us were around, and it borders four states plus Canada. If you’re trying to win a bar bet in Erie County, fine. As national business, it’s a head-scratcher. Not every headline needs to be a crusade.

There’s also the small issue that renaming one of the Great Lakes is not like swapping the label on a rest stop. Maps, treaties, international bodies, state lines, federal agencies, shipping, fishing, tourism. You’d be asking a lot of people to pretend the word “Erie” never existed because a politician in Harrisburg wanted to go viral. We’re all for a little showmanship, but this is “look at me” politics, not governing.

Trump has always had a talent for branding, and sometimes that matters. But the country didn’t elect him to spend his time refereeing naming contests. We’d rather see energy put into the things that actually hit families in Pennsylvania: jobs, energy prices, the border, the mess in our cities, and getting schools back to basics. America First doesn’t mean “rename everything.”

If the lawmaker wants to celebrate Pennsylvania’s connection to the lake, there are better ways that don’t require rewriting geography. Clean up the shoreline. Back industry and port upgrades. Fight the regulators who treat working towns like an inconvenience. Leave Lake Erie alone, and let Trump focus on the fights worth having.