The Battle of Lake Ontario: Trump opens a new front in the war on things with names

Filed 2h ago · Via Michigan Advance · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (After) · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

President Trump has ordered federal agencies to refer to Lake Ontario as ‘Lake America,’ a symbolic jab at Canadian sovereignty amid an escalating tariff dispute. The lake, and the province it's named for, predate the gesture; Ontario is named after the lake, not the reverse.

Michigan, meanwhile, faces new tariffs on Canadian goods layered atop existing cost pressures, with cross-border trade, labor and infrastructure deeply enmeshed between Michigan and Ontario. Michigan Democrats have seized on the tariffs to press affordability attacks against Republicans, while the administration's water-related priorities have apparently settled on nomenclature rather than the state's actual drinking-water contamination problems, including lingering PFAS and Flint-era concerns.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

There is a certain honesty in a governing philosophy that has concluded the fastest route to a legacy is the label maker. Renaming a body of water costs nothing, fixes nothing, and cannot be audited, which makes it the rare federal initiative guaranteed to come in under budget. The water itself remains exactly as contaminated as it was under its old name, but at least the paperwork now sounds patriotic.

Source: Read the original at Michigan Advance → Scored: Hyperfun · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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