If nothing else, you have to respect the commitment to laziness. Lake America. It’s a name that somehow combines the height of imperialist arrogance with an unshakable determination to leave work at 2:30. We’re going to conquer the world. Just don’t expect us to sit in traffic.
I keep picturing Lake America’s origin story as one of those sitcom scenes where the protagonist has to come up with a pretend name on the spot and panics into grabbing words from his immediate surroundings. I’m, uh … Desk McLaptopman. Like:
HEAD OF SPACE FORCE: Mr. President, we’ve blundered our way into an escalating trade war with Canada, our single largest export market. The economic fallout for the nation could be devastating. Experts at all levels of government are united in the belief that the only way to avert the crisis is to aggressively rename a lake.
DONALD J. TRUMP: Rename a lake?
HEAD OF SPACE FORCE: Aggressively.
DONALD J. TRUMP: Which lake?
HEAD OF SPACE FORCE: Lake Ontario. It’s one of the Great Lakes, sir. An extremely suitable target for a surprise nomenclatural attack.
DONALD J. TRUMP: Shock and awe. Intriguing.
HEAD OF SPACE FORCE: Shock, awe, startlement, wonder, incredulity, amazement, beguilement … we’re prepared to empty the whole linguistic arsenal on this.
DONALD J. TRUMP: The Canadians are very nasty people. They’ve treated me very badly. When I visited Montreal, they let me eat a Horse, but it wasn’t Secretariat.
HEAD OF SPACE FORCE: Did you … want to eat Secretariat, sir?
DONALD J. TRUMP: He was the best Horse. Even the failing New York Times, a Corrupt Media Outlet polluting the shelves of our beautiful Newsstands, an excellent form of Furniture, by the way, which I love to Peruse at our many immaculate Kiosks and Airport Racks, that I know are there even though I never walk through a Concourse, because Presidents, outstandingly, are bequeathed with different, and better, Flying Protocols, never using Commercial, for Security, and Other Reasons, polluting our Newsstands, as I say, with LIES and FAKE NEWS about the Election, which I won, easily, acknowledges this.
HEAD OF SPACE FORCE: So … is that a yes on renaming Lake Ontario?
NATALIE HARP: Yes.
HEAD OF SPACE FORCE: What name should we give the lake, sir?
DONALD J. TRUMP: Uhhh, call it Lake … Lake … Lake … [his eyes alight on an enormous map of the United States, with “America” written across it in huge capital letters] … I’ve got it.
I’m walking into a trap here. I’m doing it on purpose. The executive order Trump signed on August 27 decreeing the renaming of Lake Ontario was primarily intended to distract us all from talking about anything more substantive. (Do you need a list? Rising prices, war in the Middle East, ICE raids, data centers, election rigging by the right, the normalization of corruption, the general feeling that reality itself is slowly dissolving into a corrosive slurry of precarity and grift, to name a few.) Every 10 minutes we spend yelling about the monikers of freshwater aquatic bodies is 10 minutes that Trump and his administration can spend rewriting federal guidelines to mandate death by firing squad for a poor person who eats an acorn or whatever. Yet here I am, yelling about exactly the freshwater moniker they want me to yell about.
I’m a sucker! But I keep thinking about Trump’s obsession, and really the whole political right’s obsession, with renaming stuff. Not just the lake, but everything. Every political movement tries to influence language to some degree; the more totalitarian the movement, the more linguistic control it attempts to seize. When George Orwell wrote 1984, he made it clear that the Party’s most sinister act—more than the surveillance, the propaganda, the enforced scarcity, or the torture—was the rewriting of the language itself to make it harder for people to conceive of dissent. MAGA and its Republican forebears aren’t working on that scale, partly because working on that scale would require things like “foresight” and “a plan” and “hours of painstaking labor.” But there’s still something revealing about the half-assed cartoon vision of Trump-led American dominance that they’re trying to rebrand the country around.
Let’s run back the highlights of recent right-wing renaming efforts and see what they can tell us about MAGA’s agenda to co-opt the power of words, or as I call them, “America noises you can also write down.”
1. Freedom Fries
The year was 2003. France, inexplicably, was not super supportive of the United States invasion of Iraq, even though it was a tactical masterstroke that solved all our Middle East problems forever. To punish our perfidious allies, who would all be speaking German if not for us, Republicans in Congress took French fries off the menu at three congressional cafeterias and replaced them with freedom fries, which were the same thing, only freer. (They cost $1.25.) Everyone made fun of this at the time. It is now the template for the entire federal government.
The biggest difference between 2003 and now is that back then almost no one went along with the change. A few scattered restaurants changed their terminology, and the company that makes French’s mustard rushed out a panic-stricken news release assuring Americans that French’s was a family name. But McDonald’s didn’t rework its menu to pander to Republican sensibilities. Newman’s Own didn’t drop a These Colors Don’t Run salad dressing. The congressional posturing was mostly seen as the cheesy stunt it was, and everyone quickly moved on.
In 2026, however, pandering is a way of life. If you look from within the U.S., Lake America has already replaced Lake Ontario in both Google and Apple Maps. This is true despite the fact that renaming the lake is crushingly, spectacularly unpopular: A recent poll found that only 14 percent of Americans approve of the change. (That is a wild number. More than 14 percent of Americans would approve of the advent of the apocalypse.) MapQuest—MapQuest!—has surged to the top of the App Store purely for refusing to go along with the switch. But big corporations are increasingly willing to comply with White House language directives without consulting popular opinion, with the result that we are living in the Freedom Fries Expanded Universe.
2. Trump
You think you understand that Trump loves to name things after himself. You sweet, innocent child. You have no idea how much Trump loves to name things after himself. The Wikipedia page “List of things named after Donald Trump”—which naturally includes a high percentage of things named by Trump personally—runs to hundreds of items. You know about Trump Tower, the Trump Foundation, and the numerous failed Trump casinos, including Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza, Trump World’s Fair, and Trump’s Castle. Do you remember Trump Steaks? That was a brand of mail-order steaks, sold exclusively through QVC and the Sharper Image, that launched in May 2007 before being discontinued two months later due to catastrophically poor sales. Please reread that sentence; it is the funniest thing ever written. No, wait, sorry, the funniest thing ever written is actually this line, from then–Sharper Image CEO Jerry W. Levin: “The net of all that was we literally sold almost no steaks.”
How about Trump Ice, a Trump-branded bottled-water brand discontinued in 2010? Trump Vodka? Trump Chocolate? How about the not one but two Trump fragrances sold to men who … want to smell like Donald Trump, I guess? RIP, Donald Trump, The Fragrance, released in 2004, and SUCCESS by Trump, released in 2012. Did you know Trump owned a travel-booking website, GoTrump.com, that folded in 2007 after a year of operations? What about Trump Mortgage, a home-loan company that shut down that same year? Or the Trump Network, a multilevel marketing company that sold vitamins before folding in 2012?
We’ve got a board game. Multiple video games. Three magazines. A winery. Four books. We’ve got a failed line of coffee products called Select by Trump. We’ve got a failed airline called Trump Shuttle. In D.C., we’ve now got the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace and the endless, sprawling fight over what I think is officially known as the Donald J. Trump John F. Kennedy Kennedy Center Featuring Donald Trump (Presented by Saudi Aramco). In the ancient depths of geologic time, we’ve got a fossil sea urchin called Tetragramma donaldtrumpi. It lived around 100 million years ago, was about an inch in diameter, and has been described as “resembling a Life Savers candy.” The sea urchin is by far the coolest thing on this list. It’s also one of the only things not named by Trump himself.
All of this looks like sheer vanity and self-promotion, and it is. But I wonder whether there’s more to it than that. Trump famously descends from a German family called Drumpf or Drumpft. (If you were online during the first Trump administration, I am sorry for awakening old nightmares, and I promise not to type the word “covfefe” again before the end of this piece.) At some point in the 16th or 17th century, that surname became “Trump.” In other words, Trump’s ancestors rebranded themselves in a way that gave Donald a name suggesting the best card in the deck, a name that is a synonym for win. He might be equally self-obsessed if he’d been named Donald Eakins, but I don’t think we’d have Eakins Steaks or a smash 1980s bestseller called EAKINS: The Art of the Deal.
Trump’s name—the word itself—has always been his best asset. He’s always understood that sticking a simple, memorable word on something is the most bluntly effective way to shape how people perceive it.
3. Sleepy Joe
See, for instance, the many simple, memorable, and bluntly effective nicknames he’s pinned to his political enemies. Crooked Hillary. Low-Energy Jeb. Gavin Newscum. The playbook is identical: Identify a negative trait people perceive, or can be taught to perceive, in the opponent. Then make that trait an inescapable part of their name. With men, attack their virility, masculinity, or size. (Little Marco Rubio, Pencil Neck Adam Schiff, Tampon Tim Walz, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer.) With women, attack their intelligence or emotional stability. (Crazy Kamala, Stupid AOC, Nervous Nancy Pelosi.) With Black people, say “Low IQ.” (Low-IQ Maxine Waters, Low-IQ Person Hakeem Jeffries.)
Democrats and progressives in the Trump era have largely tried to influence language by coaxing it toward careful inclusiveness and inoffensive euphemism. I would argue that this has mostly happened in ways that are well intentioned and fairly mild, but it seems clear that it can also appear confusing, insincere, and alienating to people who find the new rules hard to keep up with. Obviously, there are countless exceptions—the oceans of the Jurassic era did not teem with half as many sea urchins as 2026 does with assholes—but I don’t think the majority of people who “hate wokeness” hate the idea of speaking politely about other people, which is all “wokeness” really is. I think they hate the feeling of anxiety that comes from sensing the boundaries of polite language changing in unpredictable ways that could leave them exposed to accidental and humiliating errors.
If you feel that anxiety, you might find something titillating or reassuring in Trump’s playground insults, which are simple, assertive, instinctual, and direct. They offer people who see themselves as part of Trump’s in-group a sort of subliminal invitation to join the dark side. You could sit around worrying about being nice, or you could embrace rudeness and banish worry altogether. After all, if it’s OK for the president of the United States to reject “political correctness” (that is, basic decency), surely it’s OK for you, too.
4. The Department of War
The word “defense” makes MAGA guys uncomfortable. If you have to think about defense, it means you could conceivably be attacked, and if you could conceivably be attacked, it means someone might look at you and think you’re beta. You’re vulnerable. Weak. Just like your dad said you were when you were 6, when he caught you scribbling on the Cinderella page in your sister’s Disney princesses coloring book. Look, son. This world is a ceaseless barrage of terrifying threats. A man must neutralize those threats by projecting the absolute certainty that he can obliterate them all instantly, by himself. He does this by wearing his hair short and clenching his jaw to make it look as square as possible. What about this logic is not clear to you? Oh, you’re going to cry? You’re going to cry now? That’s great. Cry. I always wanted another daughter.
Only pussies concentrate on defense, is my point. Wars are fought by warfighters. Have you ever heard of a defensefighter? Get serious. That’s not even a real word. We need to have a Department of War because we need to have a big stage full of extremely tall flags, and we need to have a man on that stage talking about hormones. By hormones I mean the big one. Testosterone. We’re calling it T now, to give ourselves an edge over the Communist Chinese. Maybe you’ve heard of a little thing called gender? Shut the fuck up. No, you haven’t. Never say that word out loud. We have no anxieties about that word. That word doesn’t scare us. It’s just illegal to utter it here in our $29 billion Alpha Penis Wolf Force Bunker.
Insecure? Fuck you. We’re not insecure about anything. We’re so secure we’re usually drunk by noon. My hands are shaking a bit, due to the extreme securitymaxxing I am flexmaxxing with at all timemaxxes. The sweat on my neck gives me a fine gloss of added security and confidence. My pillow smells like security when I wake up.
5. The Washington Commanders
Trump wants them to go back to their old name. Same with the Cleveland Guardians. This is essentially an extension of the political nicknames thing. Whatever he likes gets a name that conveys inherent goodness, the Big Beautiful Fill in the Blank. Whatever he doesn’t like—in this case, Native Americans, or at least the reminder that European colonization of the U.S. occurred at the expense of people who were already here—should have an insulting name attached to it. And everyone should be encouraged to use it, to inscribe his prejudices, his taste, and his authority in their minds.
6. Mount McKinley
In this way, language can work as a semi-subliminal tool to spread Trump’s own warped sense of power and entitlement. In 2015, Alaska’s tallest mountain, which had been officially known as Mount McKinley for more than a century, was renamed Denali by the Obama administration. Denali is the old Native American name for the mountain, and it’s what everyone in Alaska has more or less called it for generations. Last year, however, Trump ordered the name to revert back. This was done partly because Trump has a weird man crush on William McKinley, but it was surely no accident that rechristening the mountain replaced a centuries-old Koyukon word with the name of a white Republican political leader.
If someone convinced Trump that Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony was named after a Civil Rights activist named the Rev. Walton Sparkle, he would sign an executive order forcing all My Little Pony characters to be named after Confederate officers. “This is General William M. ‘Constitution’ Browne,” your toddler would say, trotting an action figure along the back of the sofa. “She has purple wings.”
The point of all this is that language, for the Trump administration, is a tool of garden-variety culture-war distraction, but it’s seldom only that. It’s also a way to posture, a way to project a desired identity, and a way to stamp a worldview onto the world itself, or at least onto the navigation apps that reflect it. Of course, all of that applies to language used by all political movements, but successful political movements in the modern era have seldom been as crude, aggressive, and sloppy as MAGA, which makes Trump’s approach to names unusually revealing. The ambition and will to power are clearly visible, because of the aggression. So are the underlying indiscipline and terror, because of the sloppiness.
In his great essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell writes that there are certain vague, anodyne phrases—“a not unjustifiable assumption,” say, or “leaves much to be desired”—that act like “a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow,” allowing us to dull the immediacy of reality with the familiarity of received speech. I believe that names, for MAGA’s grifting elite, act like a packet of amphetamines. Whenever you feel like you’re losing, when the scheme is collapsing or you think you’re about to be found out, take a destroyer named after Franklin Roosevelt or some antifa traitor like that and rename it the USS Kid Rock. The resulting jolt of energy and self-assurance will power you through two news cycles at least.
To control people’s language is to control their thoughts. That the Trump administration is kind of clumsy and bad at this is a stroke of extreme good fortune; that it’s determined to annex the lexicon one executive order at a time is the opposite. Trump sees a world where the oceans and mountains themselves reinforce MAGA values. That’s a world worth opposing by every means available, even if you have to download MapQuest to do it.
After all, the fact that none of Trump’s renaming is subtle or well thought out doesn't mean it isn’t effective. The whole arc of his political career suggests that renaming Massachusetts The Big Jerk State and turning Election Day into You Will Die If You Vote for Democrats Day would work better than the most beautifully written and brilliantly reasoned manifesto. In fact, why am I writing this? I should end this document and get busy marketing a line of mail-order bison burgers under my new brand, Fire Stephen Miller Into the Sun Industries, Ltd. Prime cuts, rich flavor, $74.99 a pound. Available exclusively at the Sharper Image. Bon appétit!
7. The Gulf of America
That's right, assholes. We did this with saltwater, too.
