That’s the question on the minds of Democrats, Republicans, independents, Americans and pretty much the entire world right now. President Donald Trump thought it was best use of his time Thursday continuing his trade war with Canada by signing an executive order in front of TV cameras to “officially” rename Lake Ontario into Lake America. Now all we need is an ocean.
So maybe we'll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific,” he told reporters. Trump can force the federal government to start renaming various bodies of water around the world until every river is a Trump River, every lake is a Lake America, and every ocean is the Big Beautiful Reflecting Sea. America’s allies and enemies alike will continue using the old names as their opinions of not just the Trump administration but the institutions it represents continue to shift towards overt mockery.
Trump’s personal approval rating, now around 33 percent, will keep dropping like a rock. But if only the approval rating was the only issue on Trump’s plate. Americans struggle to afford groceries, the war in Iran continues despite the U.S.
None of that is the most important, though - it's a symbolic renaming that had to come first. Republicans, desperate for a positive message to carry as a banner through the midterms, have to be watching today’s events in disbelief. As the president sat next to a surreal graphic once again claiming that Lake Ontario would be creatively redubbed “Lake America”, he sparred with reporters, claimed the Iran war would go on seemingly in perpetuity, and then asserted he’d change the name of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
His message, unfocused on anything other than personal beefs, comes as Republicans are just a matter of weeks away from facing the voters. Members of the president’s party have been growing more and more public with their anxieties for weeks, worried about the effects of the Iran war, higher consumer prices and the lack of a unifying Republican message. Gas prices remain stubbornly above a $4 per gallong average nationwide and the administration is facing backlash from ranchers as officials pause beef tariffs to deal with surging costs at the grocery checkout line.
With economic issues still at the top of voters’ minds, Trump continues to bat away concerns about persistently high gas prices, food costs and other issues while reports of his family’s own stunning profiteering continue to pour in. But Thursday’s spectacle pushed the bounds of absurdity, even for Trump 2.0. It raised the question entirely of what kind of news value it serves for the same set of White House reporters to spar with the president on-camera every day, rarely making serious news while giving the president a boosted platform to deliver a daily rant to the eyes of millions of Americans.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
