We have officially entered a new era of stupid in this country. To be fair, we’ve been lurching in this direction for a while. But watching Donald Trump giddily name one of our five Great Lakes last week felt like an escalation even by his standards.
Lake Ontario is now “Lake America,” according to an executive order Trump signed on Aug. 27 (and it’s now emblazoned on Trump Store hats that will cost you a cool $55). Kids across the nation used to remember “HOMES” as the pneumonic device for the lakes — Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. As Edwin Eisendrath pointed out on our show this week, now they’ll have to remember “SHAME” (something our current president lacks). Trump’s stunt also isn’t even popular, with Americans opposing the name change by a 4-to-1 margin (it even loses by 10 points with Republicans).
This isn’t Trump’s first foray into imbecilic geography. Everyone remembers the Sharpie from his first term, when he doctored a hurricane map because he couldn’t admit he’d gotten the storm’s path wrong. That was embarrassing. But in his second term, he’s unilaterally renaming bodies of water we’ve shared with our allies for centuries. Last year, he rechristened the Gulf of Mexico because he’s mad at our neighbors to the south over immigration. Now he’s deluded himself that his “Lake America” E.O. will stick it to Canada over his failed trade war (which also is extremely unpopular in polling).
And Trump expects the rest of us to just go along with it.
And here’s the thing — we are going along with it. Or at least our billionaire corporate masters are. Google Maps complied within days, switching the label to “Lake America” for U.S. users, the same capitulation it made last year when Trump ordered the Gulf of Mexico renamed the Gulf of America. Apple Maps held out for longer, but wilted in the face of intense lobbying from the administration, even though a source told Status that “not a soul” agrees with the decision.
Meanwhile, MapQuest (there’s a blast from the past) put out perhaps the most dignified corporate statement of the year: “We’re not changing the name of Lake Ontario. Name it whatever you want at your leisure.”
But the fact that the most powerful tech companies on Earth continue to indulge Trump’s temper tantrum shows that corporate America has decided that autocratic appeasement is just the cost of doing business now.