Trump signs order renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America

The order directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the Department of the Interior to update the Geographic Names Information Service to reflect the new name. Trump said the move was not intended as a message to Canada, despite escalating tensions between Washington and Ottawa over trade and tariffs.

“No message,” Trump said, when asked what signal the renaming sent to Canada. He then criticised Canada over trade, saying it had been “ripping us off for a long time” and accused it of failing to contribute sufficiently to the defence of North America.

“We lose, on average, over the last 15 years, $60 billion a year carrying Canada,” Trump said. “We just can’t do it anymore.”Read More:US trade war 'devastating' for Canada.

Trump said his administration would impose substantial tariffs on Canadian cars to encourage manufacturers to produce vehicles in the US.“We don’t want them to make cars for the United States of America,” he said.

“It’s very simple,” adding that “Canadian officials have treated us very badly.”“We can't let the whole Canadian thing has been going on for decades, and it has to come to a stop,” he said. Trump compared the renaming of Lake Ontario to his administration's earlier decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.

“As you know, we took something called the Gulf of Mexico, and we changed it, and now it’s very routinely the Gulf of America,” he said. “All we need is an ocean,” Trump said. “So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific.

Maybe we’ll change them both.”