A Collector's Progress

Every institution has a skeleton beneath its public face, a structure of authority deciding who may act upon it and what will hold. Names are part of that structure. They tie a terminal, a building or a shoreline to whoever built it, paid for it or was thought worthy of remembrance. Mostly they are unnoticed. But one man has spent the year testing, methodically and without much subtlety, exactly which ligaments in the American body politic will bear his weight.

The record so far reads more like a ledger than a tantrum. Palm Beach International Airport is now President Donald J. Trump International Airport, following legislation passed in Florida. That one was relatively straightforward. Friendly legislature, available airport, pen.

The Kennedy Center proved less accommodating. Its Trump-aligned board voted to put his name on the building; a federal judge ruled that only Congress could rename a memorial established by Congress, and the name came down. The board has since voted 20 to 3 for another approach: inscriptions crediting Trump with restoring and renovating the building, along with a proposed President Donald J. Trump Plaza.

There is an old distinction between being entrusted with an institution and possessing it. It has survived largely because previous custodians understood the difference.

Penn Station and Dulles Airport remain in the pending column.. In February, ABC News reported that Trump had offered to unfreeze $16 billion for the Hudson Tunnel project if Senator Chuck Schumer agreed to rename Penn Station and Dulles after him. Trump said Schumer suggested the Penn Station name. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, later said it was something the President had floated. Authorship appears less important than having the proposal available. Penn Station is already the subject of substantial federal spending and a federally directed redevelopment. Dulles has a capital program worth more than $20 billion. Both therefore come with something considerably more useful than a naming committee: money.

There was already a useful trial run. In 2025 the Gulf of Mexico became, for US federal purposes, the Gulf of America. Mexico remained unimpressed. It's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, responded by producing an old map and suggesting that North America might instead be called “América Mexicana”. This was perhaps the first indication that this game can accommodate more than one player. Washington changed its terminology and Mexico kept its own. It was a useful demonstration of the difference between having the authority to name something and not.

Then, on Thursday, the collection acquired a lake. Trump signed an executive order directing the Interior Secretary, working with the US Board on Geographic Names, to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America for federal purposes. Federal maps, contracts, documents and communications are to follow. Trump called the change official and effective immediately; the written order gives the relevant agencies 30 days to carry out the work.

Asked what message he was sending Canada, Trump said there was no message. He then explained that Canada had been ripping the United States off on trade for a long time. There are occasions when interpretation merely gets in the way.

The difficulty is that Lake Ontario is shared with Canada. Washington can decide what US federal agencies call it. It cannot issue the same instruction to Ottawa. Canada's Prime Minister, Mark Carney, supplied the necessary clarification. The name Ontario, he noted, predates both Canadian Confederation and the United States. Canadians, he said, would continue calling it Lake Ontario, “then, now and always.” That is roughly where executive authority runs out.

At the signing Trump surveyed his collection so far. America now had a gulf and a lake, he observed. “Now all we need is an ocean.” The Atlantic and Pacific were mentioned. Possibly both. It was an intriguing extension of the principle. The Atlantic touches Europe and Africa as well as the Americas; the Pacific comes with an even larger congregation of interested parties. Renaming either would test the proposition on a grander scale: not whether a president can order his own government to use a name, which plainly he can, but whether saying it often enough makes it true for everybody else.

There is an old distinction between authority and ownership, just as there is between stewardship and possession. The interesting thing about the ledger is not Trump's fondness for putting names on things. Vanity is an old political weakness and, in itself, not especially illuminating. What the entries record is the reach of presidential authority, and the points at which administrative power, appointments and federal money cease to produce the desired result.

Public office has always come with temptations. One reason for surrounding it with laws, boards, conventions and other people's names was to place some of those temptations beyond easy reach. An airport can be renamed by a friendly state legislature. A board can vote, Federal money can acquire conditions and Federal agencies can alter their maps. Beyond that, other people begin to have a say.

There is something almost elegiac about the waste involved. The Interior Department, the Board on Geographic Names, federal databases, an Oval Office signing ceremony and the machinery of government have all been brought to bear on the question of what Americans should call a lake. Canadians will continue calling it Lake Ontario. Somewhere between those two facts lies the actual measure of the exercise.