Trump’s Lake Ontario bluster: Why treating his sovereignty threats as a joke is dangerous

When United States President Donald Trump first began calling former prime minister Justin Trudeau the “governor” of the “great state of Canada” in December 2024, I remember telling friends we should be concerned.

One friend told me I was overreacting.

It was just Trump being Trump .

By then, Trump’s taste for insults and outlandish claims was well established .

Read more: Psychoanalysis explains why Donald Trump is taunting Canada and ‘Governor Justin Trudeau’ Calling a Canadian prime minister a governor could easily be heard as just another taunt.

Early on, even some Canadian officials dismissed his talk of Canada becoming the 51st state as a joke .

Almost two years later, that explanation is harder to sustain.

Trump has repeatedly questioned Canadian sovereignty , including insisting he’s serious about making Canada the 51st state .

Escalated trade war His government has also escalated its trade war with Canada, most recently imposing 50 per cent tariffs on roughly US$20 billion in Canadian goods and prompting Canadian retaliation.

Now Trump has signed an executive order directing the American federal government to rename Lake Ontario as “ Lake America .” Read more: Trump’s ‘renaming’ of Lake Ontario is emblematic of centuries of colonial erasure The name is almost comically uncreative.

But the logic behind it has a long colonial history.

Naming places can be a way of claiming territory and shaping who is understood to belong there.

Cannot rename the lake for Canada Trump cannot rename the lake for Canada.

But “Lake America” gives official form to an idea he has repeated for nearly two years.