(CNN) — It increasingly feels as though President Donald Trump is trying to do unpopular things ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
But he might have outdone himself with his latest move.
Trump on Thursday signed an executive order to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” He did so after Canada declined to capitulate in the trade war he recently launched.
While there’s not yet polling on this specific move, it’s difficult to believe it will be anything but a complete political dud.
And while it’s unlikely to exercise Americans too much, it will likely feed into longstanding perceptions that Trump is more focused on trivial matters than the things they actually want, like lowering prices.
The move recalls one of Trump’s splashiest (so to speak) moves on his first day back in office last year, when he signed an order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
But that went over like a lead balloon.
An Ipsos poll that week showed Americans opposed the renaming 70%-25%. About 8 in 10 independents opposed it, as did 45% of Republicans. More than four times as many Americans strongly opposed it (46%) as strongly supported it (10%).
A slightly later Marquette Law School poll showed similar — Americans opposed the renaming 71%-29%.
Both polls tested a number of early Trump moves or threatened actions. Remarkably, the “Gulf of America” was the most unpopular among eight things tested in the Marquette poll, and it was the second most unpopular among 15 tested in the Ipsos poll.
In both polls, in fact, it was more unpopular than even Trump’s pardons of January 6, 2021, defendants — perhaps the prototypical controversial early Trump move.
And since then, Americans have taken a pretty dim view of Trump’s penchant for renaming things — including after himself.
After his handpicked board of loyalists tried to rename the Kennedy Center after Trump, Americans said by a 2-to-1 margin that he had “gone too far” in making changes to institutions like it, according to CNN polling from last month. Just 9% of Americans in a Pew Research Center poll said it was appropriate to name things after Trump while he’s still president, yet his administration keeps trying to do just that — including, CNN reported last week, by potentially substituting Trump’s name for a Black war hero’s that was set to be on an aircraft carrier.
And there’s reason to believe that the “Lake America” move will play even worse than the “Gulf of America” did.
The main reason is that Americans tend to be more sympathetic to Canada than Mexico. While there’s a constituency for cracking down on Mexico, especially given decades of illegal immigration over the US-Mexico border, Canada doesn’t engender such negative feelings, recent polling suggests.
Indeed, when Trump launched tariffs against both Canada and Mexico early in his second term, the Canada ones were narrowly more unpopular, with more than 6 in 10 Americans opposing them.
(This, of course, hasn’t stopped Trump from launching another trade war with Canada.)
Americans also balked at Trump’s proposal to make Canada the 51st state. Marquette polling last year showed 75% of Americans opposed that.
The other main problem is the passage of time. While these kinds of stunts might have felt a little cuter when Trump was riding higher early in his term, they now risk reinforcing how preoccupied he is with not just trifles, but things that Americans decidedly do not want.
Polls have long shown around three-quarters of Americans think Trump is neglecting the most important issues, especially lowering prices. Instead, he’s waging war against Iran (which raises gas prices) and launching a trade war with Canada (which also could raise prices).
Now he’s casting a spotlight on the latter with a move that Americans thought was pretty stupid when he did it the first time. And it’s arguably even sillier than that was, given Lake Ontario wasn’t even named after the Canadian province. (It was actually named 200 years earlier, in the 17th Century.)
Even some Republicans are balking, with the GOP nominee for Wisconsin governor, Rep. Tom Tiffany, saying Thursday that the name should stay the same.
Trump joked in the Oval Office Thursday that he might not be done renaming bodies of water.
“We have a gulf. We have a lake. Now all we need is an ocean,” he said. “So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”
You could say he’s playing the hits. But it’s really playing the flops.
The-CNN-Wire
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