President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America if Canada doesn’t cave to his demands in the still-escalating trade war.

After days of verbal jousting, Trump singled out the Canadian industrial powerhouse province whose premier has derided him as a dictator and worse.

“The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer,” Trump wrote on his social media site.

Trump later posted a stylized map of the lake with its official “Lake Ontario” title crossed out and replaced by a gold-colored “Lake America” label.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who urged Trump to “kiss my a--” a day earlier, said no one north of the border was planning to back down, but that American consumers would be the biggest losers from the president’s bluster.

“My objective is to protect Ontario and Canada, and ironically the American consumer,” Ford said Tuesday.

The renaming threat is reminiscent of Trump’s 2025 move to rebrand the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

Lake Ontario is a shared international waterway and multiple international, federal and regional agencies oversee it, so the United States cannot unilaterally rename it.

The border between New York state and Ontario runs underneath the middle of the giant lake, with each entity governing their portion of the lakebed and shoreline. The U.S. and Canada jointly manage issues relating to the water body as a whole.

The new threat came as Canada struck back at the U.S. by announcing retaliatory tariffs on about $20 billion worth of American goods, including steel, dairy products, appliances and farm equipment.

The new Canadian tariffs extended well beyond industrial goods, hitting everyday purchases such as seafood, cheese, clothing, cosmetics and toilet paper, with some facing duties as high as 50%.

Canada’s retaliation came after the Trump administration imposed 50% tariffs over the weekend on Canadian goods following the collapse of trade negotiations.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney accused Washington of trying to subordinate Canada and said U.S. demands during the failed talks showed that Americans wanted to “destroy our major industries.”

The tit-for-tat tariffs will cause economic pain and fuel inflation on both sides of the border. But Trump is more vulnerable to political backlash because his Republican allies are facing a tough fight to hold onto Congress in the midterm elections looming in November.

Carney also pointed to American demands that Canada relax requirements for some products to be labeled in both French and English, a lightning rod issue for Canadians especially in the Francophone Quebec province, which borders New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

Trump denied targeting the French language or culture, declaring: “I love French Canadians.”

“I would never interfere with Canadians speaking French! In fact, I have never even thought of doing such a stupid thing,” he wrote.

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