It's easy to read President Donald Trump's statement that the U.S. is giving “serious consideration” to renaming Lake Ontario as "Lake America" as pure trolling. And it certainly is trolling, to a point. But the evidence suggests he really means it too.
This is more than yanking the Canadian maple tree. Trump's reasoning was that Americans no longer expect to be doing much business with Ontario. The remark landed mid-trade-war, days after talks with Ottawa collapsed.
Sure, "Lake America" is a cheap way to needle Canada while the tariffs bite. It costs Trump (or perhaps Natalie Harp) nothing to toss out a Truth Social post. But there's more to it than that.
Trump has built a working politics of symbolic sovereignty. When he wants to demonstrate American primacy, he treats the map as something the U.S. is entitled to rewrite. He's acting like a Victorian cartographer of the British Empire.
After all, who's going to stop us? In 1858, John Hanning Speke left an ailing Richard Burton behind at Tabora and pressed on to a lake that local people already called Nyanza, one of several names then in use. He renamed it for Queen Victoria, naturally.
The Royal Geographical Society, which sponsored him, is pretty candid about what the expedition was for. British and Indian authorities wanted knowledge of East Africa’s interior, information that would later help European powers carve the continent into imperial spheres. The "Scramble for Africa" was on.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
