The trouble with turning Lake Ontario into Lake America, in the estimation of Fox News host Trey Gowdy, has nothing to do with sovereignty or diplomacy. It is the acronym. Gowdy, a lawyer and former Republican representative from South Carolina, told viewers of “The Five” on August 27, 2026, that swapping “Ontario” for “America” in President Donald Trump’s renaming would push the familiar Great Lakes memory aid uncomfortably close, in his view, to the name Hamas.
Yes — the militant group.
Generations of schoolchildren have relied on HOMES — Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior — to keep the five Great Lakes straight. Gowdy said committing the mnemonic to memory took him 12 years, and he did not sound eager to watch anyone rework it now.
An Acronym Problem on “The Five”
Under the president’s new name, the “O” in that memory aid turns into an “A.” That, Gowdy told the panel, is where his hesitation starts.
“The ‘O’ changes to ‘A.’ That’s close to ‘H.A.M.A.S.’ That’s what bothers me about changing the name from ‘Ontario’ to ‘America’ — is how close that acronym is to ‘H.A.M.A.S.’ It’s going to confuse a lot of kids,” Gowdy said.
“That’s why I haven’t made up my mind on it yet,” he added on the show.
Gowdy left it to viewers to decide whether the reservation was sincere or simply a needle aimed at the president’s latest cartographic venture. The reasoning was strange enough that a co-host cut in.
Co-host Jessica Tarlov pushed back during the segment. “No kids know what Hamas is,” she said. The exchange quickly outgrew the studio, bouncing across social media and international news coverage. An obscure quarrel over a memory aid had become, by then, one of the most discussed moments of the entire renaming saga.
How the Renaming Unfolded
Three stages produced the map dispute that Gowdy was still deliberating over. On Truth Social on August 25, Trump wrote that the United States was “giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America.” A TikTok video came the following night, showing him taking a pen to a map and writing the new label across the water by hand: “We’re gonna call it Lake America.” On August 27 he signed an executive order making the change, effective immediately.
The order landed in the middle of an escalating fight over trade. New 50 percent U.S. tariffs on scores of Canadian imports took effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern on Saturday, August 22, after trade negotiations collapsed. Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada would match the levies “dollar for dollar,” with retaliatory measures set to begin September 8. Nor is Lake Ontario solely American — Canada owns its northern shoreline, a geographic fact that gave the renaming a pointed edge.
Trump has redrawn the labels on North American waters before. He signed an executive order on Inauguration Day renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”
The president made his case for the trade war to Gowdy himself in a Fox News interview aired Sunday, August 30. “We lose all of this tremendous money,” Trump said, telling the same host who objected to the “Lake America” acronym: “They think they’re a state, but they’re not a state. Why should we be subsidizing Canada?” In that same sit-down, reported September 1, a Gowdy question drew an uninterrupted answer from the president that ran 7 minutes and 55 seconds.
Mockery Floods the Internet
Reaction to the Lake Ontario order came fast and without mercy. Jokes about the executive order and the hand-drawn TikTok that preceded it filled social feeds. Others skipped the commentary and renamed the lake themselves, floating alternatives that ran from the ridiculous to the sharply political.
Polling showed the disapproval reached beyond social feeds. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released September 1 found 63 percent of Americans opposed the name change and 14 percent in favor. Closing Sunday, the three-day survey of 1,023 U.S. adults carried a margin of error of about four percentage points. On the new tariffs on Canadian goods, the same poll put opposition at 57 percent, against 20 percent support.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford took his objections to television, telling ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, August 30, that the tariffs and the protectionism behind them were “the worst thing you could do for the American economy” and “absolutely backwards.” On the renaming, he said: “It was like something out of ‘Saturday Night Live’ when he signed documents saying change it to Lake America. It’s — no one’s going to call it Lake of America. It’s been Lake Ontario for hundreds of years.”
Gowdy supplied a fresh twist to the pile-on. Sovereignty, diplomacy and the logistical chore of revising maps, charts and textbooks all went unargued; instead, the Fox News panel wound up debating whether the new acronym sounds close enough to a foreign militant organization to trouble fourth graders. Gowdy never claimed it would spell the group’s name — the letters in fact yield HAMES, and, rearranged, SHAME.
The clip spread quickly. A “Lake Hamas” banner topped the segment when the Times of India ran the clip, casting Canada as the party getting the last laugh. Driving the growth of a trade-war jab into an unexpected political and internet sensation were the increasingly strange arguments being made about it on cable television, rather than the order itself.
What Comes Next for the Lake
An executive order can change what the federal government calls a body of water. It cannot force Canada, international mapmakers or anyone else to follow along — the same limitation that applied to the Gulf of America order, which drew resistance and ridicule of its own.
Trump kept up the pressure over the weekend. In a Truth Social post on Sunday, August 30, he demanded that all Canadian companies expecting to continue doing business with the U.S. reshore their headquarters within its borders. “Many of them are Companies that moved out years ago due to stupid U.S. Leadership,” the president wrote.
For now, whether the Lake Ontario order means anything in practice depends on how widely the new label is adopted. Its rhetorical effect is already obvious: without touching a single tariff schedule, a president trading blows with Canada over tariffs has found a way to keep the dispute in the headlines.
