By renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America, President Donald Trump has aroused the wrath not only of most Canadians, but of a majority of Americans as well. Indeed, his swipe at the nation against whom he started a trade war has even angered a community that overwhelmingly supported the Republican’s election campaigns — and which shares the same name by which the lake in question is known to the rest of the world.
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“In the upstate New York town named after Lake Ontario, some supporters of Donald Trump oppose his executive order renaming the body of water ‘Lake America,'” reported The Daily Beast’s William Vaillancourt on Tuesday. At a different point in the article, Vaillancourt added that “according to a new Reuters/Ipsos survey, only 14 percent of respondents approved, while 63 percent did not. The same poll found that only one in five respondents supported Trump’s tariffs on Canada.”
The outlet also observed that as a result of Trump’s renaming, Google Maps changed the lake’s name for American users, prompting a resurgence in the app MapQuest that caused it to become the No. 1 overall free app in Apple’s U.S. App Store by Monday.
Residents of Ontario echoed that ire.
“I don’t think the lake’s name should be changed because it’s history,” Dave Rupp, the operator of Ontario’s liquidation store and a 2024 supporter of Trump, told The Washington Post’s Laura Beveridge on Tuesday. “And I don’t like changing history.” Similarly Cassandra Tylenda, a farmer and Trump voter, admitted that “I like Lake Ontario better, but there’s nothing I can do about it.” (She continues to support Trump’s tariffs against Canada.)
One Ontario resident who did not support Trump, Serena Eaton, told The Washington Post that she believes Trump renamed the lake in order to distract from the US-Israel war against Gaza and his refusal to release files related to his close friend, the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
“America doesn’t just own the lake,” the 24-year-old Eaton pointed out. “I’m not going to call it Lake America. But my town is really redneck. I’m sure a lot of people will just switch their brains off and tune out sensible reason.” Another individual who lived near Ontario, Cayuga Nation member Charles Smith, made a deeper historical argument, telling the Post while standing outside a Dunkin that “it’s been Lake Ontario for a very, very long time, and it will always be Lake Ontario.”
Not every Ontario resident opposed Trump’s behavior.
“I would like it if they changed the name here to the Town of America: The Town of America on the Lake of America,” Serafino Rosso, a 41-year-old telecoms manager and Trump supporter, said to The Washington Post. “It makes me feel really patriotic. It felt Canadian before.”
Similarly a 33-year-old man named Frankie Amalfi echoed Trump’s rhetoric, declaring that “he will tell you right off the bat that Canada’s been getting us for years. He doesn’t let them walk all over us.”
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He added, “We have the Gulf of America, the Lake of America. All we need now is the Ocean of America.”
Despite what Amalfi claimed, Canada did not provoke the trade war against the United States. To understand how so many Trump supporters could bully a weaker nation and enjoy it, AlterNet spoke in August with Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist and professor of cognitive science at the University of Bristol.
“I used to live in Oklahoma for five years, so you can imagine — I’m familiar with farmers and that mindset, though that was a long time ago (laughs),” Lewandowsky explained. “Look, human beings do all sorts of things, and sometimes you just look at it and think, “What on earth?” Being hypocritical — feeling pain for yourself but not making the connection that maybe this other person is also in pain, and maybe we should support each other rather than throwing welfare recipients under the bus so I can have my subsidy — different people come to different conclusions about that.”
AlterNet also spoke in August with Dr. Steven Hassan, cult expert and author of “Combating Cult Mind Control” and “The Cult of Trump,” who shed light on how they can change their views on issues like US-Canada relations purely on the word of a cult-like leader such as Trump.
“These destructive groups, like the Trump movement, are lying all the time,” Hassan told AlterNet. “And part of the appeal is really about using emotionally leading rhetoric to scare people, to create “the other,” to demonize. I’ll quote Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book, ‘The True Believer.’ He said, ‘The strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.'”
As for Trump’s tariffs, economist Dr. Robert J. Shapiro — who advised Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — told AlterNet in August that they will only worsen America’s ongoing inflation problem.
“There’s no good news on inflation,” Shapiro said. “Just this week, Trump announced 50 percent tariffs on our largest trading partner, Canada, which will further increase inflation.”
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