President Donald Trump's relevance is "declining with every passing moment," according to the Washington insiders behind Pod Save America, who argued that his latest weak attempt at "trolling" demonstrates just how much he has "lost his fastball" as a public figure.

On the latest edition of the podcast, former Obama administration officials Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer discussed Trump "losing wars, raising prices and changing maps," noting that his only public event on Thursday was an executive order signing to rename Lake Ontario as "Lake America." The move came as a petulant response to crumbling trade talks with Canada, with Trump adding that he might also consider similar changes for the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The hosts have been consistent critics of the president throughout his second term, with Pod Save America — one of the most downloaded political podcasts in the United States, produced by Crooked Media, the company Favreau co-founded with fellow Obama alumni after leaving government — serving as a prominent liberal voice in Democratic political commentary.

Unlike Trump's similar move early in his second term, when he attempted to rename the Gulf of Mexico — an effort that drew considerable scrutiny and public outcry — the purported change to Lake Ontario has largely failed to draw more than a shrug from most corners of the political world. When pressed to identify a serious political implication of the move, which he described as "dumb s——," Pfeiffer, Obama's former senior communications advisor, suggested it showed that Trump's abilities have declined to the point that he is now even bad at trolling his enemies.

"Donald Trump's not even good at trolling anymore," Pfeiffer said. "I mean, we've said this before, where he's lost his fastball, but... you can almost feel the relevance just declining with every passing moment that people don't care, and he can't even... Like he does this for outrage. He can't do it."

He continued: "The second thing is that Democrats in the world have kind of figured out how to react to Trump. Like, if when this happened with the Gulf of America, imagine if this happened four years ago. Everyone would be screaming from the rooftops, you know, what a gigantic deal this is. You know, 'What an embarrassment for America. How dare he politicize the once independent board of geographic names and, you know, just like stacking it with cronies. Democracy is at risk. We can't even count on lake-naming anymore.'... Now no one cares."

The body Pfeiffer referenced, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, is the Interior Department panel that historically handled naming decisions with limited political involvement — a convention Trump's Gulf of Mexico order broke by directing the change through executive action rather than the board's standard process.

Pfeiffer also pointed out that when Trump declared the Gulf of Mexico renamed the "Gulf of America" near the start of his second term, numerous news outlets and technology companies ultimately acquiesced, with firms such as Google and Apple updating the name of the body of water in their GPS apps. As of Saturday evening, by contrast, Lake Ontario remains unchanged on both Google Maps and Apple Maps, and discussion of a potential name change has been minimal to non-existent. Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes, sits on the border between the Canadian province of Ontario and New York State, meaning any unilateral U.S. renaming would carry no legal weight on the Canadian side or in international usage.

Source: Alternet