Let’s begin with the first problem, which is that Donald Trump appears to have gotten the history exactly backward.

What a surprise!

Lake Ontario is not named after the Canadian province of Ontario.

Ontario is named after Lake Ontario.

This is the sort of fact that can be discovered in roughly the amount of time it takes to type “Lake Ontario” into Google, assuming no one on the presidential staff was otherwise occupied renaming airports, battleships, writing laudatory Truth Social posts, or the next big lie.

The name Ontario was attached to the lake centuries before the Province of Ontario existed. It comes from an Indigenous word generally understood to mean something along the lines of “great lake,” “beautiful lake” or “sparkling water.” Ontario did not become a province until Canadian Confederation in 1867.

So Trump is essentially punishing Ontario by renaming the thing Ontario was named after.

That is not statesmanship. It is the geopolitical equivalent of getting mad at George Washington and demanding we rename the man because you don’t like Washington, D.C.

But the absurdity really blossoms with the proposed replacement: Lake America.

America.

The name America comes from Amerigo Vespucci, an itinerant Italian explorer who sailed around parts of the New World and never saw Lake Ontario, never saw Lake Erie, never saw Lake Michigan and, for all practical purposes, had about as much connection to the Great Lakes as Marco Polo had to the Garden State Parkway.

A German cartographer put Vespucci’s name on a map in 1507, and through one of history’s stranger branding exercises, half the Western Hemisphere eventually inherited it.

So the grand patriotic gesture here is to remove an ancient Indigenous name from a lake and replace it with the name of an Italian traveler who never came within hundreds of miles of the place.

You almost have to admire the efficiency. It manages to be historically ignorant, geographically nonsensical and culturally tone-deaf all at the same time.

And then there is the small nuisance called Canada.

Lake Ontario is an international body of water. Fifty one percent of it belongs to Canada, a sovereign country that is under no particular obligation to participate in whatever cartographic improv exercise is taking place in Washington.

The United States can call it Lake America. Canada can continue calling it Lake Ontario. Most of the planet will presumably continue calling it Lake Ontario because that is what it has been called for centuries and because adults generally do not rename major geographical features every time somebody gets cranky.

This is what makes the whole exercise so perfectly Trumpian.

Presidents have enormous powers. They can negotiate treaties. They can confront wars. They can reduce deficits. They can build infrastructure. They can reform immigration. They can try to make government work better.

Or they can sit around renaming lakes.

If the guy in the oval office really has developed a passion for improving the nomenclature of upstate New York, though, I have a suggestion.

A little farther west sits Love Canal, the infamous toxic waste site near Niagara Falls where more than 20,000 tons of hazardous chemicals were buried, eventually poisoning the surrounding neighborhood and turning the name into a national synonym for environmental catastrophe, government failure and industrial irresponsibility.

Now there is a place begging for a rebrand.

Forget Lake America.

Rename Love Canal.

Trump Canal.

It has history. It has toxicity. It has lawsuits. It has people desperately trying to get away from it.

And unlike Lake Ontario, the name would finally make a certain amount of sense.