U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this week calling for Lake Ontario to be be renamed Lake America in the United States. The directive follows another renaming that generated considerable controversy: Trump's 2025 executive order changing the Gulf of Mexico's name to the Gulf of America — a change U.S. federal agencies adopted in official usage, even as Mexico objected and some international bodies and news organizations continued using the original name, illustrating the limits of unilateral renaming where a feature is shared with other nations.

That limitation is at stake with Lake Ontario as well: the lake straddles the U.S.-Canada border, and while the executive order applies to U.S. usage, Canada — which shares jurisdiction over the lake — is under no obligation to follow suit.

Trump's preoccupation with renaming geographic features is now the target of a scathing parody by liberal economist Paul Krugman, published in a Friday column on his Substack page. Krugman, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2008 and spent decades as a New York Times columnist before moving much of his writing to Substack, has been a persistent critic of Trump's economic and trade policies.

The Lake Ontario order came amid a week in which Trump's trade war with Canada escalated considerably. After Trump threatened Canada with new 50 percent tariffs, the Canadian government under Prime Minister Mark Carney responded with retaliatory tariffs of its own — some of which could be as high as 50 percent. The renaming push, coming in the same week as the tariff exchange, adds a symbolic dimension to an increasingly strained bilateral relationship.

In his column, Krugman observes that Trump's renaming campaign is unlikely to end with the "Lake America" order.

"There are already reports that Trump may not stop with trying to rename Lake Ontario Lake America, and rename other places too," Krugman writes. "So I have a few suggestions. I mean, the Pacific Ocean? That sounds weak and woke. Let's rename it the Lethality Ocean. Farther afield, the Black Sea? Sounds DEI to me. Make it the European Heritage Sea."

He continues: "What about the Cape of Good Hope? Real Americans don't hope, they act with warrior ethos. Rename it the Cape of Epic Fury."

The "warrior ethos" Krugman invokes is a reference to the Trump administration's decision to rename the U.S. Department of Defense the "War Department," and to the goals that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have set for the agency. Hegseth, a far-right MAGA Republican and former Fox News weekend host, has repeatedly argued that the U.S. military has been undermined by "wokeness," which he hopes to replace with a "warrior ethos." The department's renaming is part of a broader pattern of rebranding federal institutions under the administration, a pattern Krugman's parody deliberately mirrors by applying the same logic to international geography.

Krugman's "Cape of Epic Fury" remark alludes to Operation: Epic Fury, the military strikes against Iran that Trump launched in late February. Trump promised that Operation: Epic Fury would bring the Iran war to a quick conclusion. Six months later, however, the U.S. and Iran remain at war, with no end in sight.

Krugman adds jokingly of his suggestions: "I'm sure there are many more."

The 80-year-old president, speaking to reporters earlier this week, hinted that further renaming could be on the horizon: "We have a gulf, and we have a lake. Now, all we need is an ocean. Maybe we'll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we'll change them both." Whether U.S. naming changes of this kind gain traction beyond federal usage — particularly for waters bordered by many nations — remains the open question raised by the Gulf of America episode.