15 September 2026

Lake America: The Memes From Trump's Renaming Spree

A stylised red poster of Donald Trump pointing upwards, captioned Trump renames more things

There is a specific kind of news story where you read the headline, decide it is fake, check, and find out it is not. And then a week later you read a very similar headline, decide it is real, check, and find out it is not.

We have arrived at that stage with the renaming.

The one that started it

The Gulf of Mexico became the Gulf of America. That one genuinely happened, by executive order, and the internet responded with the only reasonable question available.

A Botero painting of a very round pope captioned Trump renames Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America, with the words y tho — Two words. No follow-up question required.

"y tho" remains the single most efficient piece of political commentary produced in the last decade. Two words, one enormous baroque pope, and absolutely nothing left to add.

And now the lake

Then this appeared, and here is where it gets complicated.

A social media post reporting an executive order renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America, next to a map of the Great Lakes showing Lake Ontario between Canada and New York — The map is helpfully included so you can see exactly which bit of Canada is being annexed nominally.

Lake Ontario. The one with Ontario in the name. The one that is, geographically speaking, extremely adjacent to a country that is not America and has historically had opinions about this sort of thing.

I want to be straightforward with you: I cannot verify that this one is real. Neither, it turns out, can most of the people sharing it, and that is genuinely the funniest thing about this entire saga. The renaming spree has been going long enough that "Trump renames large body of water" no longer trips anyone's fake-news detector. The joke and the news now arrive in the same font.

The Donald Ducks

This is the best one. It is not close.

If the lake is American now, the argument goes, then the Canada geese on it are American birds and require appropriate naming. Hence: Donald Ducks. Every one of them photoshopped with the hair. Sitting in formation. Waiting.

It is stupid in the way only genuinely good jokes are stupid. Nobody sat down to write it. Somebody just thought "geese" and then could not stop.

The escalation

Once a format works, the internet does not stop at one. It maps the entire world.

A detailed nautical map in which the Strait of Hormuz has been relabelled the Strait of Trump in large gold lettering — Note the effort. Somebody matched the typeface.

The Strait of Trump is a particularly good entry because of the craftsmanship. Whoever made it did not slap text over a screenshot, they matched the gold serif lettering, the spacing and the shadow. There are people putting more production value into this bit than into their actual jobs.

And then, inevitably, the oceans.

A social media post reporting that Trump may rename the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, quoting him saying maybe we will have to change the name of the Atlantic and or the Pacific — At this point the map is just a to-do list.

At which point the bit stops being a bit. If the Atlantic is on the table, there is no natural stopping point. The moon is a body. The sky is a region. Tuesday is arguably a name.

South Park did the obvious thing

The escalation reached its logical conclusion when the show most equipped to handle it simply renamed itself.

A CNN graphic reporting that South Park has rebranded as South America for its new season, showing the town sign with America replacing Park — The sign has been changed. That is the whole joke and it is perfect.

They changed the sign. That is it. No episode required, no monologue, no satire beyond swapping one word on a wooden board at the edge of town. Sometimes the highest form of commentary is doing the thing yourself, immediately, with a straight face.

A quiz where you also get no say

Which brings us neatly to the only appropriate response: a five question quiz in which your friend's opinion is noted, respected, and completely ignored.

A NoodleStrike quiz looks like an ordinary yes/no quiz. The catch is that one button per question refuses to be pressed. It dodges the cursor, ignores the first few taps, or swaps places with the other button at the moment they commit. The answer was decided before they opened the link, which makes it thematically perfect here.

Title it "Do you accept the new names?" and use these five. The bracket is the button that still works.

"Do you accept Lake America as the correct name?" (Yes) Open with the one they will actively fight. That is the point.
"Is the Gulf of America the Gulf of America?" (Yes) A tautology they still cannot agree to freely.
"Should we go ahead and do the Atlantic as well?" (Yes) Escalate, exactly as the memes did.
"Are Canada geese now legally Donald Ducks?" (Yes) The one that gets screenshotted.
"Do you get any say in this?" (No) The closer. Rig it to No and the quiz explains itself.

Narrate it with Trevor, whose fifteen moods include boss, mastermind and dangerous. A man declaring things into existence while your friend fails to object is the correct casting.

For the result card: "Ratified. Objections noted and discarded."

Every quiz example is playable straight from the page, and how it works explains each trick.

Build one and rename something of your own while you still can.